


Mysteries of Love

by onthesea_mystery



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Academia, Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Angst, Call Me By Your Name - AU, Coming of Age, First Kisses, Getting Together, M/M, Noah isn’t a main ship but sort of is?, Ronan POV, Set in the 1980s, Slow Burn, music and swimming and summer shenanigans, set in Italy, sex things
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2018-04-17
Packaged: 2019-02-17 21:45:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 25,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13085985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onthesea_mystery/pseuds/onthesea_mystery
Summary: Then the door of the rusted Fiat swung open and the straight line of his shoulders climbed from the depths of the car—his shirt was a billowy blue, faded with either time or from the sun. His skin seemed to melt into the color of the fabric, and he at once became not a man in a billowy, blue shirt, but a man, skin and bones, and suddenly very alive and real.Ronan, briefly, subconsciously, considered the torsos of those statues he’d seen on Gansey’s slides; how effortlessly their creators projected, with unyielding transparency, the shape of a human body, their complexities, realism, and, most importantly, their sensuality.---Call Me By Your Name - AU





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [moreraventhanothers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moreraventhanothers/gifts).



##### 1983, somewhere in Northern Italy

—

_Most of us are simply more alive in the scenes of our dreams._  
_The there’s you. You’ve got something I’ve been wanting, oooh._  
_You’re so new._  
  
New Balance — Jhené Aiko

—

The tepid silence of the bedroom was only broken by the sound of a car arriving. 

Languidly, only half curious, more peeved at the disturbance, Ronan shifted along his bed so he might see out the long, open French doors that led to the balcony. 

From this vantage point, body twisted so it was his head that hung, nearly upside down, over the edge of the mattress, he could just make out the wide press of the drive with it’s bleached white gravel, flanked by the precocious green of the young olive trees.

Just at the mouth of the drive, where it cascaded into the half circle of the carport, idled a blood orange Fiat 127. 

It was odd, seeing a Fiat here, especially one as old as this one was. Even from this distance, through the hazy wrinkle in the air, Ronan could see brown rust pealing from the edges of the fender. The chrome was dull, too, dented, if Ronan had to guess, once a mirror, now lost to time. 

Not many people had cars here, and if they did, they certainly didn’t drive Fiat 127s. And if they _did_ drive Fiat 127s, they certainly did’t drive this one, unapologetically aged, on the cusp of it’s extinction. Ronan would know. He’d spent much of his life haunting this villa, this countryside and it’s coves, the discotheques pressed into the old stone buildings around his favorite piazzetti, Monet’s berm with it’s smooth rocks and icy water, the crashing sea, the spiked rocks at the jetty. Ronan would know. 

His brow crumbled, eyes searching the reflective surface of the Fiat’s windshield. There were two people in the depths of the car, the passenger turned ever slightly to the driver. A smile, a casual shoulder, shrugged. Maybe a laugh. Had he heard it through the open window?

Ronan shifted so he laid on his stomach instead, now as watchful and attentive as a bird. 

Then the door of the rusted Fiat swung open and the straight line of his shoulders climbed from the depths of the car—his shirt was a billowy blue, faded with either time or from the sun. His skin seemed to melt into the color of the fabric, and he at once became not a man in a billowy, blue shirt, but a man, skin and bones, and suddenly very alive and real.

Ronan, briefly, subconsciously, considered the torsos of those statues he’d seen on Gansey’s slides; how effortlessly their creators projected, with unyielding transparency, the shape of a human body, their complexities, realism, and, most importantly, their sensuality. 

The man’s hair moved in flat waves as he rushed to the back of the car, pulled open the trunk with the vigor of someone much younger in years. By this point, Ronan had drifted to the balcony, leaned against the rusted, green rail. 

The man lifted his his arm, casual, casual, and his voice echoed over the idling engine, to the driver, “Later!” Then the trunk was closed, his bag shouldered, and he turned to the villa.

The blood orange Fiat 127 puttered back down the drive, but Ronan only had eyes for the young man that stood, quite still, appraising what was to be his home for the next six months. 

_Look up_ , Ronan urged, silently, wistfully. Perilously. But the man did not look up. He instead turned away, having heard his name. 

Even from here, above, Ronan could discern the sharp line of his profile. Again, his mind tumbled over statues. 

“Adam?” This voice belonged to Gansey, who just now appeared in the carport. Behind him, Blue. They all shook hands, Gansey’s smile threatening to break his face in two. Adam, as Ronan had just learned his name to be, contrasted appealingly to Gansey’s evident excitement—casual, casual. Ronan could not stop thinking that word as he watched Gansey swing open his arms to the surrounding property, as he watched Adam turn, assessing, cool and removed in the way most American’s tended to be. Blue was also watching, Ronan noted, trying to sift through this sudden newcomer, this new housemate, just as he was.

“You’ll want to see your room, then?” Again, Gansey, ever the host. Turning to Blue, Gasney asked, “Where’s Ronan?” Ronan watched her shrug. Before she could look up at his balcony, he receded into his room. 

His room was cast in the cool blue of late morning, the sun having moved westward to bake the back of the house and it’s grounds. The light, though dim, was enough to show the tidiness of the space, the large queen bed, open wardrobe, recently emptied for it’s new occupant, and the desk, it’s chair neatly pushed beneath.

The only thing out of place was the sheet on top of the bed, rumpled from Ronan’s early morning nap. He’d fallen into a light snooze after an early run—he was sure, if he laid back into the bed, rubbed his face among the fabric, he’d smell the muskiness of his sweat. 

He left the sheets as they were, rumpled, soiled in a way that seemed to say, _I dare you to smell me here._

“Ronan?” 

This time, it was Blue’s voice. It wafted through the open French doors. Her tone held something like a question. He was meant to show Adam his new room, after all. 

But he was looking at himself in the mirror, quick to unbutton the top two buttons on his shirt, so that his fair skin might catch the sun. He was in his swim trunks, still, and he thought, hopefully, wildly, he might be able to persuade this Adam to go for a swim.

Then, he dashed from the room, down the twisting grand stairs, and into the foyer. He feigned ignorance to the arrival of their guest, grabbed an overripe apricot from the bowl in the front room, and traipsed out into the sun just as he bit into the fruit’s sagging flesh.

“Ronan! There you are!” Gansey seemed overly relieved to see him. In response, Ronan turned his head towards the trio, listless, indifferent. 

“I didn’t know you were looking for me,” he supplied, level. Casual.

They approached him. He took another bite of his apricot. The juice sluiced down his chin and he used one finger to wipe it up, up, up, and over his lip and back into his mouth.

He refused to look at Adam. It was the curiosity from before, in the bedroom, and the desperation as he leaned on the rail of the balcony for a glance, a single glance. He felt fettered and under scrutiny, chained to some sudden and unknowable thing blooming in his chest. He’d known this day was coming. He’d seen Adam’s photo before, half peeking out of the file on Gansey’s desk. Then, he’d felt threatened. Another summer, another academic, another plaything for Gansey and Blue. That feeling lingered even now, but something petted against it, as if challenging him to let the full intensity of his jealousy go. Or maybe it was challenging him to something else. Begging him to realize something he refused to acknowledge.

Whatever it was, he knew then, his feet planted in the hot gravel, that he would not like this Adam. It became him in a way most of his hatreds did. 

And yet, some small part of him, that part he refused to make friends with, the part that only visited him in his sleep, hoped that Adam had watched the way he let his forefinger linger between his lips as he sucked away the apricot juice. 

“This is Adam,” Gansey continued. Adam didn’t offer his hand as he had to Gansey. Ronan didn’t offer his either. Gansey, sensing the challenge, went on easily, “You’ll show him to his room, won’t you?”

“Follow me,” Ronan said, after an infinitesimal beat, then turned and headed back into the cool depths of the house. 

Adam followed promptly. Ronan did not slow so that he might look have time to see his new home; there was plenty of time for that yet, and Adam must be tired, anyway. He’d heard Blue mutter it as they went back inside. 

As if to answer some unspoken question, or to prove a point, Adam yawned. 

Ronan paused at the top of the stairs, near his bedroom door, and gave Adam a look that was both petulant and reluctant at the same time. “You’ll have my room,” he said, pushing open the door, stepping inside. 

Adam went in after him and tossed his bag on the bed without even nothing to rumpled sheets. Something in Ronan burned.

“Where will you be, then?” Adam asked, casual, perfunctory, as if he thought that was the correct sentence in a line of sentences that strung together a polite conversation.

Ronan gestured over his shoulder to a door in the far corner of the room. “I’ll be through there. My father’s old room.” Then, because he didn’t want to seem eager, didn’t want Adam to assume he was happy about this arrangement in any way, “We’ll have to share the bathroom. Sorry.”

“No worries,” Adam said this around another yawn. Ronan cocked his head to the side, suddenly watchful. He’d heard an accent, just then, something unbidden, unpracticed. Adam didn’t seem to realize he’d let it slip.

“I can show you around the grounds,” Ronan offered. He hoped it sounded as sulky as he intended it to. Adam didn’t seem to pick up on it at all.

Instead, Adam flopped onto the bed, face first. “I’ll nap,” he said, voice muffled by the bed.

Ronan imagined the sheets against Adam’s face, in his mouth…

Ronan scowled. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

“Later.” Adam’s accent returned with that word, _later_ , informal, transient. Ronan might have been annoyed by it, but he was again transfixed on Adam’s words being muffled by fabric. Surely the sheets rubbed against Adam’s nose. Surely he could smell the sweat. Surely he knew it to be Ronan’s. Surely.

Ronan left the room. As the door closed, and he sat on the small bed in his father’s old room, he felt it. He felt his stomach burst with a heat he’d never known in his life.


	2. Chapter 2

_I remember you then, so young and so tan_  
_Running and diving in the blue deep end_  
_I remember like it was yesterday, your summer skin_  
  
Summer Skin - Isla Roe

—

The summer came quick and unforgiving at the villa. The damp, cool spring didn’t so much as seep into warmth as it crisped, the dark and dense foliage turning a vibrant, buoyant jade, and the grey sunrises falling into saturated moons.

If ever asked what summertime meant to him, Ronan would point to the villa. Time stood still there, and the outside world was but a myth never spoken off. Jutting balconies became confessionals and trickling pools welcomed lovers to bathe. The villa during summertime became so quiet you could feel not only yourself thinking, but the whole world within the grounds, the gentle throb of life, from smallest insect to visiting professors, curious birds and passing friends.

Ronan felt the summer in his chest, the sepia stillness in time with his heartbeat, and the heat sitting on him like a second skin. 

His summertime lounging became second nature after the nearly five years he’d been coming here, periods taken between the forgiving shade of the apricot trees and the boiling smoothness of the marble around the swimming hole. 

In the long hours spent in the stifling heat, he learned to tend to his pale, pink skin, how to avoid the harshness of the burning sun, and the joys of vigorous activity. He’d come to the villa a translucent white, lanky and slim and very nearly frail of mind. 

It had first been a way to pass the time, all the swimming and the tennis and the music, but it soon became more than boredom, even more than a routine. Ronan was a shell, after all, on his first days at the villa, neatly cracked around the middle, held together by the only two people willing to look after him. 

It was a precarious situation for the three of them to be in. Blue and Gansey, though nearly twice Ronan’s age, were by no means parents. 

Gansey and Blue were academics by passion, and expatriates out of necessity. Both originally from Virginia, Gansey the heir of a dominant political empire, and Blue the leftover scraps of an overlarge clan of psychic women, they found their way back to the verdant Lombardy countryside after visiting the villa themselves while in graduate school. In Gansey’s words, it was love at first sight. To hear him speak of the place, in the years before he’d take Ronan in as his ward, had made Ronan believe in magic. 

_“Just on the cusp of the property, where the trees overrun the century-old garden wall, you can hear the music, like water trickling from a cove. It’s a blushing thing, almost too faint to make out. But the first time I heard it, as I ran my hands over the cracked, ivy-encrusted stone, it whispered to me to never leave. I felt a fawn in that moment, wise and cautious and so very alive. As alive as the olive trees and the juniper. As alive as the ocean that fed our stream.”_

But it was not magic that brought Ronan there. In fact, it was the cruel, punishing reality of a world out to ruin him. 

Death had been a novelty before his 13th birthday, but now, it was a shroud he wore around him. It was in his hair, in the freckles on his shoulders, on the calloused pads of his feet, and in his eyes when he closed them, in his ears in the dim silence of the night. Death was a companion that shared a room with his self-pity and self-hatred. It was a crowded room, that hole in his chest, and yet all three seemed to like their home just fine. 

He was still a shell cracked around the center, and Blue and Gansey were still his glue, but it was the activity that shunted the darkness into the recesses of his mind if only for a moment, a single second was enough for respite. 

Now eighteen, Ronan was broad shouldered with a healthy, hazy tan. His freckles came in waves down his body, across the sharp angles of his cheeks and the hard line of his nose. They feel onto his arms and across his chest. There were even some sprinkled over his knees, as if begging to be found.

 

“Is there a bank in town?” Adam asked on his second morning. 

Ronan looked up from his egg, eyebrow shaped in a perfect arch, and glanced at Gansey. Gansey paused, shuffled his newspaper, then looked at Blue, who looked back. Ronan could sense the bewilderment in their wordless conversation—this was marred slightly by their evident curiosity. Adam seemed unperturbed by all of this, something that Ronan decided to be frustrating. He couldn’t pinpoint why, exactly, though he guessed it might be Adam’s need to distance himself from his own eccentricities. Or, it was Adam’s overall obliviousness to the world in which he now resided. Or, maybe, more likely, it was the sudden and deliberate reminder that Adam was separate from this little world Ronan, Blue, and Gansey had created, and that Adam wished to keep it that way. 

Ronan picked up his spoon and scooped a portion of his egg. It slopped over the side and dripped messily down. Blue tsked, though didn’t look at him when she handed over a napkin.

Gansey was folding his paper when Ronan took the clothe from Blue. “No one’s ever needed a bank account before,” Ronan all but snapped. 

Adam shrugged, taking his own spoon and thumping it against the egg so that it cracked and the egg spilled down the side, much like Ronan’s had. “I’d like to open an account,” was all Adam responded, shoveling a large portion of his soft-boiled egg into his mouth. 

Gansey _hmmed_ thoughtfully, sitting back in his chair. His arm was tossed across the back of Blue’s, a gesture that Ronan was still getting used to, even going on five years. The Gansey Ronan knew was not this Gansey. Ronan’s Gansey was more a boy than man, more bronze than grey. 

In Gansey’s current posture, tranquil and still, right leg tossed over the left, head tilted back to accentuate the frustrating curve of his neck, Ronan could almost admit to himself that Gansey was near twice his senior. His grey hair was swept away from his face, and he was wearing those wire frame glasses Blue loved so much. His legs, bare below his shorts, were strong, though thin, as was often the case with aging, yet active men.

Ronan had difficulty accepting this version of Gansey, the Gansey who was not aghast at a resident looking for a bank to set up an account (most of their visiting residents didn't have a penny to their name, after all). Ronan’s Gansey was a wild thing, something caught between the clouds of a storm, the itch before rain, or maybe the sun after it passed.

Ronan’s Gansey was the man who saved him, brought him here, to this villa, and gave him the summer.

“You’ll have to take him to Crema,” Gansey finally said, looking at Ronan. Ronan could see that Gansey had decided something through all of his pausing and _hmming_ and calmness, just by the way the sun caught the brown flint in his eyes. What Ronan could not see, however, was whether he’d made up his mind about Adam, or about Ronan himself.

“All the way to Crema?” Ronan sighed dramatically and slouched against the back of his chair to emphasize his annoyance. 

Adam grabbed a second egg, which he proceeded to mutilate again with the blunt side of his spoon. 

“Everything else will be closed,” Gansey said as a way of response. He was eyeing the mess of Adam’s egg cup with a look that was almost pitying. Something flared in Ronan’s chest and he almost kicked Gansey beneath the table. “He can take Noah’s bike.” 

Ronan looked at Adam then, truly looked at him, for the first time all morning, a small, simmering rage etching itself inside his gut. The sun was coming through the trees in spikes and Adam’s face was mosaicked with the jagged pattern of the leaves. There was a faint breeze, which pushed the tree back and forth so the pattern kissed across his tan skin. 

It was then, as he bit into another egg, his third, that despite his tanned face, forearms, the back of his neck, despite having traveled through Sicily before joining them at the villa, that Ronan saw parts of Adam that hadn’t been exposed to the sun. The palms of his hands, the same as the soles of his feet, the curl in his throat, and the tops of his thighs, just poking from beneath his bunched-up shorts. These parts were as pale and smooth as Carrera marble. 

Glimmering, uncorrupted, yet budding with potential that Michelangelo himself would debase. The fleeting moment of it became seconds, where eyes roamed skin, where Ronan, unknowingly, or, maybe boldly, licked the tip of his tongue against his bottom lip. In those brief seconds, Ronan learned more about Adam than he ever thought he might. 

“You know how to ride a bike, Adam?” Gansey was asking. Adam paused, perhaps thoughtfully, before looking up to catch Ronan’s gaze. This was the first time Adam acknowledged they were sitting right across from each other. That fact alone made Ronan’s skin crawl with heat akin to a sunburn. It didn’t help that Adam was smirking, maybe, the faint line of his mouth pursed ever so slightly, and his eyes were twinkling. It took Ronan a moment to realize they were sharing a joke, a small sort of thing, as if Gansey and his concern, the privileged heat of it, was beyond recognition except for between two young people.

All at once, Ronan’s idea of the afternoon shifted, and the idea of riding to Crema with Adam didn’t seem so bad. Ronan offered a smirk in return. 

“I can ride a bike,” Adam wiped the corner of his mouth, still looking directly at Ronan as he spoke. His face shifted from playful to something much more somber and distant. 

“Wonderful!” Gansey exclaimed, sipping from his cup of apricot juice.

“I can take you after lunch,” Ronan offered, his tone bordering on friendly, though he hoped he didn't sound as hopeful as he felt. He realized he hoped Adam would smirk again.

“Let’s go now,” Adam said, standing suddenly from his chair. Ronan’s heart leaped. 

“Now?” was all Ronan could manage in that moment, hoping, always hoping, he didn’t sound as flustered as he felt. He could feel Gansey and Blue watching him carefully, Adam too, and it felt like his skin might catch fire any moment. 

“Are you busy?” Adam’s brow creased ever so slightly. Ronan decided he hated seeing him look like that.

“I’m not busy. Let’s go now.” 

They then went to Noah’s shed at the edge of the property. Against the wall were two bikes. Ronan secured his forest green Traveler and gestured for Adam to take the groundskeepers bike. It was pale blue and rusted, an old Bianchi. 

Adam walked the bike in circles slowly, then swung his leg over and rode it in circles. 

“Not bad,” was all he said, after circling around Ronan a couple of times.

“It’s a piece of junk,” Ronan scoffed. 

“You wouldn’t know a piece of junk if it hit you in the face,” Adam said, then biked towards the drive that led out to the road.

Ronan watched him go, the shape of his body bent over the handlebars, the easy drag of his legs, up and down, up and down, before Adam sat straight in the seat and looked back. His face caught in the high afternoon sun and he became a washed-out painting, dusky and tan, the color of sand on a beach. 

Adam waved him to follow, and so he did.

 

Ronan found Adam to be a surprisingly easy bike partner. Adam liked to race, which pleased Ronan immensely, fast bouts of furious pedaling, followed by leisurely coasting. All was done in a comfortable silence. Or, it must have been comfortable for Adam. He hardly looked at Ronan, except to provoke him to race, and once that was done, they rode on again, facing the open road, their damp shirts sticking heedlessly to their skin.

On occasion, Ronan would slow, so Adam might ride ahead, so Ronan might again envy the simple twist of his body when he’d look around for his companion. So Ronan might watch Adam’s legs push him onward, farther and farther, faster and faster.

Ronan willed him to become a pinprick on the horizon—if he were lucky, Adam might evaporate in the steamy heat of the afternoon. If he were lucky, Adam might smirk at him again.

The curiosity was back, and the confusion. They met his temper dubiously, as if expecting it to push them off the bike. Ronan could not understand this man, what he wanted, from life, from Gansey, from the villa. From Ronan himself. 

A smirk at the breakfast table was not enough for Ronan to care, and yet he did. He cared more than he ever had before. _Will Adam look at me again? Had he seen me staring at breakfast? Surely, he felt my eyes. Surely._

In Crema, Ronan led Adam to the bank, then waited at a café in the piazza while Adam ducked inside. 

By the time Adam finished setting up his account, Ronan had enjoyed a lemonade in the sunny square. Adam joined him at the table, crossed his legs, and watched Ronan again with the same, distant look from the breakfast table.

Ronan felt the gaze like a feather on the back of his neck. 

“What does one do around here?” Adam asked, just as suddenly as he’d asked to go into town.

Ronan closed his notebook and placed down his pencil. All thoughts of transcribing became an empty static in his mind.

“Nothing,” Ronan said. “Wait for summer to end.”

“And what does one do in winter, then?” 

Ronan smirked at the answer he was about to give. Adam must have understood by the look on Ronan’s face and said, “Don’t tell me—wait for summer to come, right?”

Again, that flare in his chest. Ronan liked having his mind read, he realized. “Actually,” Ronan consented, crossing his own leg, mimicking, subconsciously, the man sitting across from him, “it’s dull here in the winter. We come for Christmas. Otherwise, it’s a ghost town.”

“And what do you do here at Christmas besides roast chestnuts and drink eggnog?”

Adam was teasing, he realized. Ronan offered the same smirk from before, the same smirk from breakfast too. Adam seemed to understand and said nothing in response. They both laughed.

“What do you do?” Adam asked after a moment, but his inflection made it sound like he said, _“And what do_ you _do?”_

“Tennis. Swim. Go out at night. Transcribe music. Read.” 

“I swim too. Early in the morning. Where does someone swim around here?”

“There’s a small pool on the grounds, but I go to a little place called Monet’s berm. I can take you there, if you want.”

Again, that hopefulness, that flare. As Ronan adjusted himself in his chair, he chanted the word _casual casual casual_ until it became a dull ache in his bones.

Adam, for his part, had the decency to not look bored with Ronan. In fact, he didn’t look _anything_ when he stood. He put his hands on his bike handles, looked down at where Ronan was sitting. “Later,” Adam said, “maybe.”

Ronan had put reading last on his list, thinking, perhaps, with some willfully bold attitude, that Adam’s list would also feature reading last. But then, staring up into Adam’s face, the passive, chilly lines of his cheekbones, the grey vibrancy of his eyes, and seeing...nothing to suggest a desire for companionship, Ronan remembered who Adam was and what he was doing here. In Italy. In Crema. At the villa.

The photo poking from Gansey’s file was laughing at him now—Adam was a doctoral student, after all, twenty-five, at least, well-traveled, educated, come to Lombardy to edit his manuscript on the deceased welsh king Glendower. Reading was certainly not an irrelevant part of his life. Conversations with deliberate teenagers, on the other hand, probably didn’t make Adam’s list at all. 

Sitting in the chair in the café, the high sun at Adam’s back, making him into an indiscernible silhouette, Ronan felt insignificant. And false. 

“Where are you going now?” Ronan asked, desperately. He knew he sounded it and hated himself for it. What was new there?

Adam was silent for a moment, then, “I’ll be around. See you.”

When Adam turned and walked his bike from the square, in the direction opposite of the villa, Ronan thought, wildly, that this would be the last time he ever saw the man. 

Something about that thought was relieving.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone! A couple notes (:
> 
> 1) First, I wanted to say thank you for the kind notes everyone has left. I can't even begin to express how happy you've made me. I loved hearing from you all & I hope you stick with me on this journey--I think it's going to be a good one.
> 
> 2) Some notes about the story so far & moving forward:  
> \- As I write, I'm realizing that I'm meshing my love for the book & the film into one place. I apologize in advance if there are die-hard book fans vs. movies fans, but you will see some familiar scenes from both places.  
> \- Some of the dialogue will be either straight from the book or the movie; some moments between Elio & Oliver can't be altered! They fit Adam & Ronan so perfectly, I need to keep them intact.  
> \- TRC characters/plot: this is a canon divergent story, so you'll notice that things are going to be different. Some elements remain the same, such as Bluesey & the Glendower obsession. Niall is still deceased & Adam was raised in the same environment as in the books. Otherwise, you might notice some changes! Do not fret, these are my absolute favorite characters of all time. I plan to do them justice.  
> \- One last note: for those looking for your typical Pynch story where Adam & Ronan overcome their trials/struggles/dark pasts, this is not that story...there will be some of those elements, BUT, much like CMBYN, this is about Ronan's sexual awakening & coming of age! If you have questions about this, please drop me a line.
> 
> 4) Again, unbeta'd. I hope that the unavoidable errors don't turn you off! 
> 
> 3) ENJOY this chapter. It's a bit longer than the last one. I'll be responding to comments next, so stay tuned from me (:
> 
> LOVE YOU ALL!
> 
> Edit: new tumblr, since tumblr refuses to help me get into my old one. Find me [HERE](https://onthesea-mystery.tumblr.com/). and love me.


	3. Chapter 3

_You're a human, in my vision_  
_You're assuming, it's collision_  
  
Collision — Hayden Calnin

 

Ronan shifted his arm so that it fell across his eyes.

Here, in the heavy warmth of late morning, he could almost sleep. But the faint ebbing of Brahms through the headphones kept him connected, as if by a thin string, to the dazed languor of the day. 

Above, the saturated pink and yellow umbrella. Next to him, the rickety white table, on which sat his papers and pencil, his recorder, all but forgotten now that the day slipped near noon. Beneath his feet, the uneven, weathered stone. Weeds poked between the grooves of each slab.

He was contented, nearly past the road that separated the waking world from sleep. Every so often, a bird would fly overhead. Their tiny, transient forms cut through rays of sun. Their tiny shadows pressed against the bright light sneaking through the pink underbelly of the arm over his eyes. 

The slow trickle of water a few feet to his left moved in time with his music. Pensively, slowly, Ronan let his eyes flutter open, wondering if he might see the old composer sitting on the brink of aged yellow stone that circled the swimming hole. 

Through the haze of his mind, this near to sleep, he did see a man on the edge of the pool, though it wasn’t an old man. This man was a young, glistening tan. His hand sifted languidly through the water, up to the fountain, where he held his fingers still, _so still_ , and let the stream splash over the tips. 

Ronan counted the droplets that fell on the inside of Adam’s wrist, wondered what it might be like to kiss the wetness away, to lick the blue vein there. 

Ronan sat up, pulled his headphones down around his neck.

Adam must have heard him move, because he said, unturning, “What are you listening to?”

 _Brahms_ , Ronan yearned to tell him, but it was a pretensious thing, to assume this man had any interest in music. It was also a desperate thing, to give himself away so easily, _so so easily_ , to a man who Ronan was sure had no interest in him. 

“Nothing,” was what Ronan said, finally.

“Nothing,” Adam repeated, stated as a fact he found both curious and trying. He still hadn’t turned, still let his hand hover beneath the stream of water. Ronan wondered what he was thinking, but it was stamped down by his own, endless thoughts. _How warm that pool must be_ , Ronan admired distantly, _how warm his hand must be._

Adam then pulled his hand away from the small stream and laid down against the edge of the pool, back to the stone. He covered his face with a hat and that was the end of their conversation. It was almost as bad as the casual _Later!_ he often subject Ronan and the others too, a dismissal only an American could produce.

Watching him there, relaxed on the stone, Ronan felt his skin might melt into the warm surface, that Adam might become marble just through being there.

The silence that fell over them was a silence that could both cripple Ronan and not mean a single thing to Adam. And why should it? Why should a doctoral student, as cold and removed as Adam, have any interest in Ronan, or the finite space that separated them, or the way Ronan’s eyes traveled along the white inside of Adam’s thigh, down to his kneecap, past his calf, then to his toes, the very toes that dipped into the pool, now, then, finally, submerged, as Adam slipped into the midday quiet that took most all the villa’s residents?

How could Adam know what this silence meant? How could he know that Ronan imagined himself crawling from his seat beneath the pink and yellow umbrella, crawling to the edge of the pool and scooping out that foot and kissing every toe there, then kissing his ankles and his knees? How could he know that Ronan often stared at him in this way, whenever they were together by the pool, stared at his bathing suit, the dips in his chest, the slow, heavy rise and fall of his breathing?

Adam couldn’t possibly know what Ronan was looking at. 

Finally, when the Brahms tape fizzled out, when the sun dipped beneath the brim of the trees, an audacious whimsy took hold, and, “Adam, are you sleeping?

A long silence followed. Ronan’s heart stuttered.

“No,” Adam finally responded. “Thinking.”

“About what?”

Adam’s toes flicked in the water. “About Heidegger’s interpretation of a fragment about Glendower.”

The silence joined them again. Ronan reset his tape, put his headset back on, and resubmitted himself to his transcription.

Days like this came often at the villa. It was hard to tell how long Adam had been with them without committing to memory that he was eventually leaving—Ronan didn’t keep calendars for that very reason. There was no point in knowing, for certain, that the end of a good thing was coming ( _Is this a good thing?_ Ronan often wondered).

The days passed lazily, sometimes exact copies as the previous, or an echo of what the next was to become. Wake early, swim, transcribe or play music, bike into town, catch a movie, dinner drudgery. Rinse, repeat.

Ronan used to do those things alone, but now there was Adam. Gansey made it clear that Ronan was to be the shepherd of the villa, the keeper of the knowledge and the keys. It could have been a burden. It was a burden. But Ronan was starting to think burdens weren’t necessarily bad things. Didn’t have to be. Shouldn’t be. Especially not when burdens, when unraveled and inspected, contained a little something called Adam.

After his first two days, Adam seemed to pop up wherever it was the Ronan hid himself away to. 

The sun shone brighter on those days. The music fit into his soul a little tighter. 

But Ronan reminded himself— _had to_ remind himself—that these little happenings were purely coincidental. They both liked to swim, after all, and to read. Maybe, Ronan allowed himself the indulgence of hoping, they both liked music as well.

On another such day, one of the endless ones that consumed their summer, Ronan sat on a low stone wall with his guitar sitting face down in the grass, a book open in his lap.

Adam lay below on a faded yellow blanket, straw hat over his face as it often was, wearing that same red bathing suit Ronan always stared at. It was silent except for the pages of the book turning, and the trees, and the birds, and the dull ebb of voices from the back patio. 

Suddenly, Adam broke the silence, “Ronan.”

“Yes?”

“What are you doing?

“Reading.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Thinking, then.”

A thoughtful pause, if Ronan was learning what Adam’s pauses meant. Then, “About?”

Ronan ached, but didn’t close his book. He paused too, an exact copy, then turned a page in his book. “Private,” Ronan finally replied.

“So you won’t tell me?” Adam hadn’t moved. He lay as still as stone. Ronan thought of marble again, beautiful Carrera.

“So I won’t tell you.”

“So he won’t tell me,” Adam repeated, as if explaining to someone about Ronan.

Ronan loved the way Adam repeated what he himself had just repeated. It was as simple as a caress, or a gesture which happened entirely by accident the first time, but became intentional the second time and more so the third. 

It reminded Ronan of the way Maura, Blue’s mother, would make his bed every morning, first by folding the top sheet over the blanket, then by folding the sheet back again to cover the pillows on top of the blanket, and once more yet when she folded the whole thing over the bedspread. Tucked into those folds were tokens of something both pious and indulgent, like acquiescence in an instance of passion.

It reminded Ronan of how Noah tuned the bikes, straightened the wheels and the handles, cleaned the oil from the chains with slow, simple caresses. Again, indulgence. Repetition. 

“I’m not telling,” Ronan said.

“Then I’m going back to sleep,” Adam relented. Ronan’s heart raced. Adam must have known. 

He must have sensed it in the brutal pink of Ronan’s cheeks, or the way his shoulders stiffened, or the placid calm of Ronan’s voice, the forced mildness of it. He must have known, and hated Ronan for it, or got some sick amusement out of watching him squirm. Why else would he prompt Ronan in this way? Why else would he lay himself out on that blanket, left leg propped up, arms tossed above his head, _tan tan tan_. Marble. 

In those afternoons, where the world seemed to lull into an endless sleep, Ronan burned. 

In those afternoons, Adam become more and more unattainable, more desirable, more hated. 

In those afternoons, silence was a profound courtier.

Moments later, or maybe it was days (it was hard to tell time truthfully at the villa):

“This is heaven.”

Ronan wouldn’t hear Adam speak again for at least another hour. 

Even in the silences, there was nothing Ronan looked forward to more than these moments, spent with Adam. This realization was a sudden thing, something he’d yet to reconcile with himself, something saved for later, in those heated instances of solitude where his self-hatred ran rampant. 

He instead allowed himself to remember, as he sat at his table with his notes, watching Adam read, or swim, or lay there, either thinking or sleeping, how he’d felt on that first morning. His curiosity, his jealousy, had been an oppressive thing, but maybe not nearly as oppressive as this was, the reality of his sudden, blooming desire, and the reality that it may never be quenched, _would never be_. 

There was nothing Ronan loved more than poring over his transcriptions while Adam lay on his belly marking pages he picked up that morning from Signora Poldma, his transcriber in Crema. 

“Listen to this,” Adam once said, removing his headphones, breaking that oppressive silence. “Just listen to this drivel.”

He then read aloud something he couldn’t believe he’d written months earlier. “Does this make any sense to you? Not to me.”

“Maybe it did when you wrote it,” Ronan offered. 

Adam looked at him then, from his yellow blanket. Ronan looked back. Adam’s eyes were the lightest grey color, faded slate. He blinked, once, twice, and Ronan considered this look one of his favorite Adam looks. It was a considerate look, and heavily thoughtful. This was a different look from the one he’d given Ronan that second day, when they visited Crema, the look that said, _I am more than you’ll ever be_.

Finally, after what felt like endless seconds, “That’s the kindest thing anyone’s said to me in months.” He spoke so earnestly, so inflamed, as if he’d been hit, suddenly, with some deep realization about himself, about Ronan, about the villa, the world, everything that was alive, everything that would be alive. Ronan thought Adam was taking what he’d said to mean much more than it was meant to be.

Ronan looked away, feeling suddenly unsure, shuffled his papers, picked up his pencil, anything, _anything_ , to dowse the uneasiness. “Kind?” Ronan muttered, the first thing that came to his mind.

“Yes,” Adam said, still looking at Ronan, though Ronan couldn’t bring himself to look back. “Kind.”

Ronan turned on his tape again, headphones shoved back onto his ears in a manner both aggressive and definitive. He didn’t know what kindness had to do with it. Or maybe, he wasn’t thinking clearly, or thinking at all. Everything muddled in his mind on those mornings. And then the silence would return, until the next time Adam spoke. 

Ronan welcomed this type of silence, where he was the master of it, the bringer of some division between them. He felt jumbled, mostly, as if he couldn’t keep himself from screaming out what it was he wanted. He worried he might spill his soul if Adam would just ask him. He might actually spill his soul without any prompting, and maybe he wanted to, just to see what Adam would do, or to see how long it took Adam to disappear. Perhaps that was the more frightening thought—Ronan could conduct this scene, knew it like he’d memorized the veins in Adam’s wrist. Boy spills soul, man leaves soul soaking into the earth, then man evaporates, though not before laughing at the boy. Or spitting at him. Or both. Somethings, Ronan liked the version where it was both, because at least he could pretend that drop of water from the fountain was actually Adam’s spit, and he’d wipe it up with his finger, put it to his lips, and lick.

Ronan also welcomed the silences that Adam would break to say something, anything, to ask what Ronan thought about something. _Have you heard of X? Or, have you heard of Y?_

Ronan felt special in these moments, like an adult, valued. No one in the household actively sought Ronan’s opinion on anything. Maybe it was his age, or his practiced disdain for meaningful conversation. Adam had yet to realize this about Ronan, but Ronan was sure he’d find out soon enough and fall in line with the everyone else that Ronan was not only the baby of the family, but also unreachable. But there he was, some endless time into his stay, asking Ronan about Athanasius Kircher, Giuseppe Belli, and Paul Celan. 

“I have,” Ronan said. 

“I’m nearly a decade older than you, and until a few days ago had never heard of any of them. I don’t get it.” Adam sounded exasperated, but impressed. Ronan wanted to smile, desperately, proudly, but his face stayed smooth and stony. 

“What’s to get?” Ronan played the part of insubordinate youth well. “Dick’s a university professor. I never had TV. Get it now?”

“Go back to your plunking, will you!”

Ronan decided that he even liked when Adam told him off. 

How Ronan wanted time to stop, truly stop. He knew that it felt like the world slowed here, but the precise happiness of those mornings, spent by the pool, under the umbrella, drinking apricot juice, and watching Adam languidly stretch in his red bathing suit, Ronan couldn’t imagine any other life, any other time to be alive.

Let summer never end.

Ronan would get on his hands and knees and beg for it, give up anything for it. _If only, if only._

But what did he want? _Truly_ want? And why couldn’t he know what he wanted, even when he was ready to be brutally honest in his admissions?

Maybe he just wanted Adam to tell him it was okay, that there was nothing wrong with him, that he was no less human. Ronan would have been no less happy if all Adam did was pick up the pieces of his dignity, hand them back to him, press them into his hand, and never question him. 

Did he want to be Adam’s friend? The idea of friendship fell flat in Ronan’s mind. He was friends with Gansey and Blue, even Noah and Maura, but that felt untrue when it came to Adam. He thought, briefly, of a phrase he’d heard Gansey once use: _Amor ch’a null’amato amar perdona_. Love, which exempts no one who’s loved from loving. 

Dante’s words seared Ronan to a crisp. Just wait. Be hopeful. 

Ronan was hopeful, pathetically so. Maybe this is what he wanted all along. To wait forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone! I wrote this chapter very quickly, and it's my favorite chapter so far. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!
> 
> Yell at me on tumblr, if you want: [onthesea-mystery](https://onthesea-mystery.tumblr.com/)


	4. Chapter 4

_I’ve been crawling up inside your lungs,_  
_feeling up your mind with my tongue_  
  
Deliverance — RX Y

—

“Would you like some juice?”

Ronan pulled the headphones from around his ears and looked up. Maura stood in the study door. She had a tray balanced on one hand, cups stacked neatly. A jug was in her other hand, filled with a a deep peachy liquid.

“I told you to stop bringing the men their juice,” whined Blue from across the room. She was curled into the wide, dark leather of Gansey’s couch. She had a book propped on her knees and didn’t bother looking up to reprimand her mother.

“The juice is for you too, Blue,” Maura relayed. Blue _hmmed_ thoughtfully, but ceased protesting. Maura must have taken this as a victory, as she then entered and set the tray and jug on the edge of Gansey’s overlarge, mahogany desk. Only then did Gansey stir, peeking up from behind his wireframe glasses. He was wearing them more and more recently, and, against all reason, Ronan thought they made him look ten years younger. 

“Thank you, Maura,” Gansey beamed, helping himself to a glass. “Ronan?”

Ronan turned in his chair and slung one arm over the back of it. He nodded. Gansey poured another glass and passed it to him.

Just then, a furious rumble of feet on stairs. Maura tossed her arms into the air, as if to say _Men!_ or _Boys!_ or maybe _Americans!_ , and left the room with a fierce shake of her hips.

Seconds later, Adam, red bathing suit, open white shirt, materialized exactly where Maura had disappeared. “Sorry, Prof,” was all he said, though he didn’t at all sound sorry, before he joined the three of them in Gansey’s study. Ronan caught Blue and Gansey’s look, which seemed to say, _he’s an odd one, isn’t he?_

Again, Adam was either oblivious, or didn’t care what anyone thought of him, not even his sponsor. 

“Late night?” Blue inquired from her place on the couch. Adam was hovering by Gansey’s desk now, shuffling distractedly through the wooden box Ronan knew to hold Gansey’s index card of notes. 

“Not really,” Adam muttered absentmindedly. Blue _hmmed_ again, turning a page in her book.

Gansey stood suddenly and shifted around his desk to stand at Adam’s side. “Do you have the card on Powys Wenwynwyn?”

“Um,” Adam twisted the cards in his hands, flipped them over delicately. “No, no I don’t think…”

“Oh, it’s here. It’s here.” Gansey shuffled a small pile from the edge of his desk and placed them back into the wooden box. Ronan watched as Adam helped, his long fingers picking deftly through the brown edged cards. He restacked them and placed them back into the box.

“Offer Adam some juice, Richard,” Blue intoned from her spot on the couch. 

“Hm?” Gansey asked, straightening up. “Oh, yes. Adam, would you care for some apricot juice?”

“Oh,” Adam paused, looked at the jug of juice as if it were some foreign element. To him, it probably was. “There’s hardly any left.”

“We’ll call for more,” Gansey assured him. Adam’s face pinched in an unpleasant way.

“You can have mine,” Ronan found himself saying, more assertive then he’d allowed himself to be when it came to Adam. “I only wanted a sip anyway.” 

“Alright then,” Adam turned to Ronan then, for the first time since he entered the room. He was looking at Ronan with those steely gray eyes, again distant, yet appraising. When Adam looked at him this way, Ronan always felt he was being scrutinized, picked apart like someone might tear apart a leaf, or pick the seeds from a lemon. 

Ronan put his glass to his lips then, took a sip, never breaking eye contact. Neither Blue nor Gansey saw the way Ronan licked the juice at the edge of his mouth, or the wet mark of his lips on the rim of the glass, or Adam’s brow, the faint crease in it, or the way his mouth parted, just minimally, as he wrapped his hands around the surface of the cup.

Adam blinked, eyes wider than Ronan had ever seen them. Ronan felt like his lungs had failed him, like time was but a stamp in the universe, erased by the tip of a tongue, a thumb over a lip smudge, an eyebrow, suggestive, unsure, daring.

Adam lifted the glass to his lips. He never blinked, eyes as hard as they’d been when he turned to look at Ronan. His eyes were a stone, a star, they were Ronan’s eyes. They were Ronan’s. 

“Oh, I’ll have a glass, then,” Blue said around a yawn and a stretch.

“I’ll call for another pitcher,” Gansey said, moving to the door of the study.

“No, have mine,” Adam said interjected, smooth, calm, pulling the glass away from his mouth. He held it out to Blue. 

“That’s yours!” she protested, but Adam shook his head, smiled that smile that said _I’m polite._

“It’s yours,” he said around that smile, and pushed the cup into her hand. 

Ronan felt the world go dark. Was there point in sight, when it collapsed like a tree in front of you?

How spontaneous he was. _Are you even real?_ Ronan found himself asking. How could he be, with all the abrupt shifts, the unceremonious ticks, all the words, precipitous, off the cuff, the whole bundle of them that haunted Ronan’s every thought? _Later!_ and _It’s yours!_ and every twist and turn he took, just to keep Ronan on his toes. 

How twisted and secretive were Ronan’s desires, compared the the unattainable steepness of Adam’s immediate world. It never occurred to Adam, in taking the apricot juice, he was taking a kiss, and in passing it to Blue, was passing it away. 

He couldn’t know. Could he?

“You know,” Gansey was posturing somewhere through the haze of Ronan’s mind. “The word for apricot comes from Arabic. If we look at the Italian, _albicocca_ , the French, _abricot_ , and the German, _aprikose_ , much like the words algebra, alchemy, and alcohol, we see they were derived from an Arabic noun with the Arabic article al- before it. The origin of _albicocca_ is _al-birquq_.”

Adam sat on the arm of that large, leather couch, one leg hiked up beneath him, the other dangling over the side, as he listened, the ever attentive student. 

“What’s truly amazing,” Gansey continued, leaning back in his chair, sipping from his glass of juice, “is that, in Israel and in many Arab countries nowadays, the fruit is referred to by a totally different name: _mishmish_.”

Blue was nonplussed. Ronan saw that she was drinking her juice too, from the opposite side of the glass from where Ronan’s mouth had been. 

“I’ll have to disagree with you,” Adam said, scholarly, respectfully.

“Ah?!” Gansey’s startled response followed. He set his cup down, sloshed some juice over the side, in his haste to sit forward so as better to see Adam. Ronan, moments ago hazed and heartbroken, felt suddenly awake at the prospect of seeing Adam’s mind turn.

“The word is not actually an Arabic word,” Adam shrugged. 

“How so?” Gansey countered, curious, indulgent. 

Adam shifted, not necessarily uncomfortable with the attention of Gansey, but now Blue, who shut her book and put it aside, and also Ronan, who hadn’t seemed to stop staring at him since he entered the room.

“It’s a long story, so you’ll have to bear with me.” Suddenly, Adam sounded very serious. His pale, slate eyes, were streaked with something momentous. Ronan wanted to touch his eyelids. “Many Latin words are derived from the Greek. In the case of apricot, however, it’s the other way around; the Greek takes it from Latin. The Latin word was _praecoquum_ , from _pre-coquere_ , pre-cook, to ripen early, as in _precocious_ , meaning premature.”

He paused, shifted on the arm of the chair. “The Byzantines borrowed _praecox_ , and it became _prekokkia_ or _berikokki_ , which is finally how the Arabs must have inherited it as _al-birquq_.” 

Blue, overcome by his display, reached out and tousled his hair. “ _Che muvi star!_ ”

“He’s right, there’s no denying it,” Gansey said gracefully, grinning in a way Ronan rarely saw. He sensed something shift in that moment for Blue and Gansey, a raw and unprecedented appreciation for the man that was Adam, the whole, unyielding entirety of him, his wealth in both beauty and knowledge, his politeness, the general gravitas that covered him so effortlessly, you had to squint to see it. 

Ronan never ceased feeling overwhelmed with all that Adam was. It fought with him like he used to fight with his brother, though he knew he could take Declan in a fight, and Adam won against him every time, without even knowing he was in the ring. 

Everywhere Adam went, he left a streak of shimmering gold, calling attention to his greatness, his unattainability. A promise that he’d be more and more, never ending greatness. Ronan was but a speck of dust in the wake of Adam’s eyes. Of course he was. Did he even deserve to be called dust? Was Ronan even there? Had Adam ever seen him? Did Adam crave to see him, dirt on the road, an ant stuck in the web of some malicious spider?

Popular was the simplest word for it, and it ate Ronan alive. 

Or, rather, Ronan’s jealousy ate him alive. 

 

The next day, the villa was alive with people, mostly Blue and Gansey’s distant family, and some locals. After lunch everyone migrated to the edge of the property, to the shaded tennis courts, where they took turns playing doubles.

Ronan sat in the sun, bare-chested, sparkling with mid-afternoon sweat, watching as Adam and Blue’s cousin Orla ricochetted balls back and forth at top speed. Orla was wearing nothing but a small, orange bikini, which accentuated her annoyingly tan skin. Adam was in his red bathing suit again, attractively shiny, toned and bronze and entirely in control.

Around Ronan was the idle chit chat of those admiring both Orla and Adam’s bodies. 

The sun was a stifling companion today, though not as stifling as the reminder of Ronan’s apparent inadequacy. When Adam met Orla at half court, hugged her, ran a hand down her back, low, low, _lower_ , dangerously close to her ass, Ronan jumped up, stomped away from the side of the court, towards a small table where Maura had set refreshments. 

Noah was there, drinking water from a glass bottle. On seeing Ronan, he handed over the water. “Che cosa?”

Ronan took the bottle, drank. “Nothing,” he mumbled. “Hot.”

“He is, isn’t he?” Noah had a glint in his eye as he watched Ronan drink. ““Everyone thinks so.”

“Shut up, Noah,” Ronan passed the water bottle back to him.

“Hit a nerve?” 

“No one asked you.”

“Oh, right. I’m just the gardener.”

“That’s right,” Ronan responded, unkindly. 

“That’s not nice, Ronan,” came from his side. Ronan turned just as Orla arrived, tugging the glass bottle away from Noah and drinking deeply. 

Ronan was about to snap a rude response, but a long, defined arm snuck around his shoulders. Ronan dared to look over, a viper curling around his stomach. Adam wasn’t looking at him, but grinning as Orla introduced him to Noah. In the distraction of the introduction, Adam gently squeezed his thumb and forefinger into Ronan’s shoulder—casual, friendly. Imitation. 

Ronan’s body might have collapsed then and there, his mind a deviant, spellbound, and untrustworthy creature. He wrenched his body away forcibly. A moment longer and he would have slackened into the touch, like a sunflower unwillingly bound to the whimsy of the sun. 

“Oh,” Adam said, taken aback. “Did I hit a nerve or something?”

Ronan shrugged, face as stony as he could manage, a warning, _don’t come any closer_.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Adam was saying. Something like mortification was seeping into his voice, along with something else, the tinge of his accent. Ronan, disoriented, wondered why now, of all times, did Adam let his accent come out? Was he trying to trick Ronan back into his grasp?

Hastily, witlessly, sensing Adam’s retreat, something Ronan didn’t want to encourage, no matter how much his body suggested otherwise, Ronan blurted, “It didn’t hurt.”

But what else could it have been, if not pain? Was Ronan to spill his guts, then and there, explain how much control Adam had over his body? Was he to give himself up without another word, lay on the grass and beg for Adam to touch him again? Was Ronan so lost, so crazy that he’d do just that so as not to see the hurt in Adam’s eyes?

Instead, Ronan mimicked the face of someone trying very hard to smother a grimace of pain.

What Ronan refused to admit, or to realize, was that touch, _Adam’s_ touch, stirred in him something he had yet to reconcile with himself: desire. It was a nerve Ronan didn’t even know existed, a nerve that produced something disturbing, something akin to his wildest pleasures.

Adam, for his part, looked surprised. “Here, let me make it better.” Ronan felt as if he was being tested. Adam’s hands found there way to his shoulders again, warm, smooth, pressing, massaging. 

“Relax,” he urged. Ronan was distinctly aware of the others, Noah, Orla, everyone. 

“I am relaxed,” Ronan bit out through gritted teeth. 

“You’re as stiff as a bench. Feel this.” He said the last bit to Orla. “It’s all in knots.”

Ronan felt another pair of hands on his shoulders, smaller. “Here,” Adam indicated with a squeeze. Orla’s hands followed. “Feel it?” Orla must have felt it, because her hands disappeared, and she was nodding in Ronan’s peripheral. 

“You should relax more,” Adam breathed, dangerously close to Ronan’s ear. 

“He should relax more,” came Orla’s assent. 

Ronan shrugged out of the hold, again, just as forceful as before. Adam’s face was a mask this time, practiced, perhaps, waiting for Ronan’s scorn. Ronan didn’t understand what he expected to see. A welcoming smile? A sneer? Pity?

What did he _hope_ to see? Did he hope to see understanding there, some light in those pale, flat eyes, that said _I know you. I want to know you. You’re mine._ What did Ronan want from Adam, if not to melt into him like butter, to encourage him to touch and touch and never stop? Would Adam laugh at him, then, if he saw the desperation of Ronan’s body? Would Adam ignore him?

Would it really be so bad, to be ignored for the rest of the day, summer, for the rest of time? Did Ronan prefer a lifetime of longing provided they both keep the little Ping-Pong game going: not knowing, not-not knowing, not-not-not knowing? Just be quiet, say nothing, and if you can’t say “yes,” don’t say “no,” say “later.” Is this why people say “maybe” when they mean “yes,” but hope you’ll think it’s “no” when all they really mean is _please, just ask me once more, and once more after that?_

Later, that night, or some other night, when it was so hot that shirts became translucent, when nipples of men and women alike were like beacons beneath the soft fabric, where shoes were kicked off, forgotten, shorts rolled up higher, but later, the young ones went into Crema.

Ronan avoided going in with the group, despised the idea of traipsing behind like some unwanted child, and instead went in alone. 

He hoped Adam would notice, his absence and then his arrival, as if Ronan suspected Adam kept tabs on him like he kept tabs on Adam. Hopeful. Ronan allowed himself to be hopeful, despite the heat, despite his fear, his revulsion at himself, despite everything in Adam’s demeanor telling him otherwise. Ronan was hopeful.

In Crema, there was a small piazzetti that had a lemonade stand where you could also buy alcohol. Ronan ordered himself two limoncellos and sat at a small table on the edge of a dance floor. It was bright and hot and there was music and dancing. Bodies bounced, as they always did, pressed together, yearning for closeness, sweat on sweat, longing. 

It was here he found Adam. 

Adam was pressed close to Orla. Or maybe she was pressed close to him. Ronan tried not to care, put the entire limoncello away without a second thought.

Noah was suddenly there, drinking the other limoncello. “They look good together, no?”

“Yes,” Ronan found himself saying, because they did. Ronan couldn’t bring himself to lie, not even to himself, not now, not as he watched Orla and Adam grind closer and closer, until Orla slipped her thigh between his legs. 

Adam leaned down then and kissed her greedily. Orla clung to him, licked deep into his mouth, bodies pulsing, rubbing. 

Oh, how Ronan wished he could be Orla in that moment. He wished he could be Adam, too, inside Adam, become Adam. Two bodies, one body. Himself and yet Adam, one in the same.

“Wanna dance?” Noah asked at his side. 

Ronan nodded. “I’ll come find you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's another chapter for you! Hope you enjoy. I want to point out that this fic is entirely unbeta'd, so please excuse any errors you see (and also let me know! I'm only human, and would love to make this as flawless as possible).
> 
> I was able to use my favorite line from Aciman in this chapter, and below I've included the original so you can know that the perfect writing is not, in fact, mine, but beautiful and necessary for this story nonetheless!
> 
> "Or would I prefer a lifetime of longing provided we both keep the little Ping-Pong game going: not knowing, not-not knowing, not-not-not knowing? Just be quiet, say nothing, and if you can’t say “yes,” don’t say “no,” say “later.” Is this why people say “maybe” when they mean “yes,” but hope you’ll think it’s “no” when all they really mean is please, just ask me once more, and once more after that?"


	5. Chapter 5

_Where have I been?_  
_In a drug daze_  
_In that sun gaze_  
_In that glossy haze_  
_And do I know you?_  
_Do I even know you?_  
  
Brassy Sun — S. Carey

—

He saw them down by the rocks, pressed against the heat of the stone. She was on her back, and he was on his stomach. Together, they were a brassy brown, the sun so bright they almost disappeared in the haze of it.

They were there often these days, lounging side by side.

Once, when it was Adam who was on his back and Orla who was on her stomach, Ronan saw Orla crawl onto him. There was more kissing, the same variety from the night in Crema. Heavy petting, Gansey called it, the day he and Blue were with Ronan on one of their late afternoon strolls.

Gansey and Blue laughed good-naturedly as they watched; they must have thought it was a healthy pairing, natural for two attractive people to migrate towards each other the way Orla and Adam did. Magnets. 

Ronan was a magnet himself. He was a south pole, just like Adam was a south pole. The harder and harder you pushed them together, the more they resisted.

Orla visited at least twice a week now, always the same, suddenly and clamorous. “Where is he?” she’d ask Ronan, who was sitting in the shade in his spot (the spot he used to think of as their spot, until Adam redefined his spot with Orla). 

“With Dick,” Ronan would sometimes answer, but most times he’d ignore her, turn his music up a little louder so she’d take the hint and leave him alone already. 

“Tell him I stopped by,” she’d say on other occasions. Ronan said that he would, though he had no plans of ever relaying the message. There was something victorious in the shape of Orla on her bike, disappearing down the long drive. It would be another day where Adam might come back to Ronan, another day without Orla as a distraction.

Other times, Ronan would lay in his room, which was actually his father’s old room, the one that connected to Adam’s by the tiny bathroom. He’d be in nothing but his bathing suit, sheets rucked around his feet, _warm, warm, warm._

In the early morning, he would listen for Adam, listen to him wake up, use the bathroom, leave for the day. Something in him liked this part of the day most—he could expect it, anticipate the slow creak of the bathroom door, the twist of the faucet. He knew Adam would leave, knew it so deep in his bones, and yet he’d stare at the door of his room, the one that touched Adam’s room, and hope, yearn to see the handle turn.

If it did turn, Ronan knew it was Adam. Knew Adam was coming for him at last, across the boundless space they had between them, crossing oceans to wash up on Ronan’s shore.

But the handle never turned. Adam never came.

In the midafternoon, the time where the villa was quietest, the times where Adam would be on the rocks with Orla, or maybe out in the gita with her for a turn in the harbor, or otherwise with Gansey in his study, Ronan would lay face down on his mattress and pretend Adam was in the room with him.

These were his least favorite times, because they felt the most real.

Ronan could feel Adam there like his guilt. The presence was heavy and unwanted and ever watchful. Adam would stand at the edge of his bed and look down at him. Ronan would pretend to be asleep, maybe to dissuade him, maybe to encourage him. That was the problem with Ronan; a masochist at heart, ebbing with thousands of years of Catholic guilt. He deserved this pain. He deserved this punishment. He craved it.

After was seemed like hours, or years, or lifetimes, Adam would lower himself onto the bed. Ronan felt the dip in the mattress from where Adam’s knee fell just next to Ronan’s knee. And then Adam was on top of him, pressing his entire body against the length of Ronan’s body. 

Adam was only in his swimsuit too. They were skin to skin, flush and warm and melting. Adam was a heaviness on him he could not shake, did not want to shake. He pressed closer and closer until Ronan was sure that Adam wasn’t actually Adam anymore, but Adam-Ronan, Ronan-Adam, two become one. One. 

When Ronan opened his eyes, he was alone in his room, but he could not shake the feeling of Adam on top of him.

He wondered if he’d ever sleep again, after, if he could ever look at Adam’s bare chest the same way.

Ronan stood, strode onto the balcony. The sun spiked here and Ronan closed his eyes against it. 

A laugh from below.

Ronan looked. It was Orla on her bike. Adam was there, too. He had his hand on her knee. She kissed him. Or maybe he kissed her. They seemed to fall into one another.

Orla and Adam was as simple as grass, and there was nothing Ronan could do about it. 

He found Adam later, swimming, long, practiced backstrokes from one end of the swimming hole to the other. Ronan sat on the edge of the pool and watched him. 

When Adam finally stopped, he pulled himself up onto the ledge of the pool in one swift motion. His tan body was firm and dripping, draped against the stone like a statue. He didn’t acknowledge Ronan. Why should he?

“I’ve seen you and Orla together,” Ronan said, against all reason.

“Oh?” was the response, more of a platitude than showing any real measure of interest. 

“She has a nice ass,” Ronan continued, probing, instigating. 

Adam’s interested was piqued then; he lifted his head up from the stone to give Ronan a dubious, if not entirely derisive look. 

“And nice tits too,” Ronan continued. What was he after, with this? Did he want to see Adam aroused? 

“Are you trying to make me like her?” Adam asked.

“Where’s the harm in that?”

“None. Except I like to go at it alone.”

It wasn’t just the desire to arouse Adam, Ronan realized, but he wanted to devalue Orla in front of him, make her less so that he might be more. The untrueness of it burned Ronan like a fire. Adam seemed equally repulsed.

“Just don’t,” Adam continued, those cool grey cutting him from across the pool. “And you shouldn’t talk about her that way. It’s demeaning.”

And like that, Adam was gone again, head back against the stone, drip drying and entirely too tan for his own good. Ronan felt cheated, but also dirty, like he’d tossed himself into a pit of mud and lived in it.

He knew Adam wouldn’t talk to him again. Knew it like he knew the snaking cracks in the patio stone, or the way the apricot trees cut through to Noah’s hut on the back end of the property. 

The days that followed where tumultuous in their emptiness. 

Adam was hardly around anymore, and Ronan sensed it was his doing. He would hear him leave in the early morning, grab a bike, and then pedal furiously down the drive, out somewhere unknown. Ronan imagined he was searching for Orla, until Orla stopped by and asked where he’d been. 

Adam wouldn’t come home until late at night, sometimes so late, he’d miss dinners. Maura was especially peeved at that. Missing breakfast and lunch was almost forgivable, but surely not dinner.

Gansey seemed less than perturbed. “He’s a mysterious guy,” he said one afternoon, after Orla left. He said it out loud to the lunch table, as if everyone sitting around the wooden mass was thinking of Adam and how odd he was and how odd it was that he’d go off as he had. 

The truth was, that was all Ronan could think about. It felt horrible in its truthfulness. It felt entirely Ronan’s fault.

 

Noah was lounging on the grass. His bike was on the ground next to him, handlebar scuffed into the dirt. He didn’t move when Ronan’s shadow fell over his face, but he did smile. “You made me wait.”

Ronan picked up the bike and looked at him. Eventually Noah stood up, joined him, and they took the shortcut into town. About halfway there, Noah sat on the handlebars and Ronan pedaled them leisurely the rest of the way.

On the edge of one of the piazzetta was a tiny ice cream parlor, where Noah insisted they stop. Noah asked Ronan to buy him cigarettes as well.

As they walked around the edge of the square, quietly licking at their ice cream, Noah’s hand brushed up against Ronan’s.

When Ronan looked him, eyebrow raised, Noah said, “What are you thinking about?”

“You,” Ronan answered, not untruthfully.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not a liar,” Ronan said.

“What about me?”

Ronan let his hand drift upwards, to the hallow below Noah’s neck, and wiped away a drop of vanilla ice cream. “That part,” he all but exhaled. 

“You just want me to kiss you again,” Noah hummed. Ronan shook his head. He didn’t want to kiss Noah again. 

“Are you trying to woo me?” There was a smile in Noah’s voice now. Against the warning signs in Ronan’s mind, he liked that he could make Noah smile. He liked that Noah wanted him to touch him again, maybe kiss him.

“Let’s go in here,” Ronan finally said. It was a tiny bookshop, one Ronan often frequented, one he knew Gansey kept a tab open at. The shopkeeper waved at him and Noah as they entered.

They walked through the shelves at a snail’s pace. Noah pulled out books with interesting titles and showed Ronan. They licked at their ice creams. At the back of the store, a middle-aged woman sat pressed with her nose into a book of poetry. 

“What are you reading?” Noah asked her. She smiled and explained the book belonged to a new poet. 

Ronan drifted away, hypnotized by the Shubert quartet that the shopkeeper was playing. Something about this day felt as still as stone, as if time had decided to stop just for him.

Back at the front of the shop, Ronan leaned against the counter and closed his eye. The shopkeeper came back and joined him and they enjoyed the quiet thrum of the radio together. When it was over, Ronan picked up two copies of the poetry book the middle-aged woman had been reading and bought them. He asked the shopkeeper to put both on Gansey’s bill.

Once outside again, the sun dipping below the tips of the low buildings, Ronan turned them down a quiet, curving alley. He sidled close to Noah and kissed his shoulder at the same time he slid the book in his hand. 

Noah shuddered and stepped away.

“Sorry,” Ronan said, on reflex, on realizing what he’d so brazenly done. 

“It didn’t bother me,” Noah assured, hurriedly, and looked over his shoulder. Ronan understood and blushed, despite hoping he didn’t. 

“Why did you buy me this book?” Noah asked as they continued walking down the alley. Ronan didn’t feel the need to answer until the alley spilled into another piazzetta. 

“Felt like it,” he said. 

“But why me?” Ronan could feel the insistence in his words and couldn’t decide if it bothered him or not. 

“I don’t know why it matters.”

“Figures.”

“What is it?”

“Don’t worry, hopeless boy.”

Ronan paused. They were in the center of the square. There were tufts of people everywhere, conversation an ebbing ocean around them. Somewhere, music throbbed to life.

Looking at Noah, then, in the dimming light, Ronan was certain he sensed an endless wave of frustration. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” Ronan insisted. 

“Just give me a cigarette.” Ronan did. 

They sat at a table in that piazzetta and the silence became near unbearable. Ronan wondered if he knew what was wrong, but refused to admit it to himself. Or maybe he had already admitted it to himself, but didn’t want to sell himself out to Noah. 

“I think you’re going to hurt me,” Noah eventually said, with finality. 

Ronan thought of the night in Crema all those days ago, where Noah and Ronan danced near to each other, close enough to sate themselves, but far enough not to draw attention. He thought about how they ate ice cream after, from the same place they had ice cream from now, and then Ronan biked them both home, Noah sitting on his handlebars. 

On the back edge of the villa’s property, where Noah’s quaint little shack sat picturesquely, they kissed. Below their feet, overripe apricots. It seemed sickeningly sweet. 

Noah made noises as they kissed, touched Ronan on his arms, chest. Ronan wanted so much to respond, but the kiss itself was sending him shockwaves of confusion. He didn’t want Noah. He didn’t want anyone, actually. He didn’t even want himself.

Wasn’t it wrong to want this anyway? Why was he letting himself want this? Not want this? Was it the same thing? 

Noah kissed his brow, then, sensing something wild and uncaged in Ronan’s mind. “ _Caro mio, che cosa_?” 

Ronan had no response for him, nothing, except to pull away, a whispered apology.

Back in the piazzetta, Noah had finished his ice cream. “I think you’ll hurt me because you don’t actually want me. You like the thought of wanting me. Of kissing me, maybe.”

“That’s not true,” but Ronan wasn’t sure which part of the sentence he was responding to. Noah must have realized this, this diversionary tactic, because he just _hmmed_.

“You’re always changing your mind.” Noah was playing with his new book now, opening and closing it, flipping through the pages, opening and closing. “Your indecisiveness frightens me. No one truly knows you.”

Ronan was looking at Noah now, the bright white of his hair, his deep skin. His lips were as red as the cherries Blue loved. 

“I want to kiss you now,” Ronan whispered, just for them. 

Noah smirked, then, as if he had figured something out. Instead of sharing, he stood, and Ronan knew what that meant and followed him.

When they were back at the villa, back at Noah’s hut, Ronan propped the bike against a tree and grabbed Noah’s arms, pushed him against his house. It was dark now, only the sound of the waves and the insects and their mouths. Noah cursed as Ronan touched the dip in his hips and Ronan felt himself smile, pulling away.

“ _Baciami ancora_ ,” Noah whined, head thrown back against his house. Ronan kissed him again.

“Do you really care for me?” Noah asked sometime later, when they had navigated to the earth. Ronan’s mind was racing with the thought of hands and chests and moaning, but at the forefront was a name and it wasn’t Noah’s.

_Adam. Adam. Adam. Adam._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi there! Sorry for the delay with this chapter. Getting back into the swing of life after the holidays has been tough. Again, unbeta'd (:
> 
> I hope you are enjoying so far! As I'm writing, I'm realizing that this is a mishmash of the book and the movie & sometimes I can't remember where one stops and the other begins. I also believe a lot of this is out of order from how it happens in both places, but I hope that isn't too much of a bother.
> 
> I had to change the Marzia plot point a bit to fit for Ronan (since Ronan would never be with a girl!), so you'll notice I added a secondary ship to include Noah & Ronan. I hope it doesn't bother anyone! I love Noah & it felt like the most realistic choice without introducing Kavinsky, who I think would have been a stretch for this story.
> 
> Last note--finally finished outlining. This was actually supposed to be one big chapter, but I've broken it down in two. We were originally looking at 10 chapters total, but I think we're going to be closer to 13. EEP. We shall see.
> 
> Anyway, enjoy, as always, and thank you so much for your kind words!


	6. Chapter 6

_If I could hold you_  
_If I would dare_  
_If I could save you_  
_From standing there_  
  
Caves — Haux

—

“You look a bit flushed this morning,” Gansey muttered from over his newspaper.

Ronan scowled, but didn’t answer. Instead, He scooped out a portion of his egg and ate it. At the other end of the table, Blue was feeding a piece of bread to one of the stray cats that roamed the property.

Maura, putting a jug of juice onto the table, said, “You’ll just attract more.”

“Exactly,” countered Blue.

Ronan wondered if Blue thought he looked flushed. Or Maura. 

He felt flushed, and overly warm, and as if everyone was staring at him, somehow _knew_ where he’d been last night, what he’d done. 

If he could, he’d just say it. Blurt it out. Free it from the cage of his chest, where it was rattling around like a spinning top. _I kissed Noah!_ he would shout. _I kissed him first and I put my fingers in his mouth and then I put them in his—_

“Morning, Prof.”

Ronan forced himself to look up slowly. 

Adam sat directly across from him at table, staring at him with those flat grey eyes. 

“You missed dinner again,” Maura chided as she put an egg in front of Adam.

Adam only smiled up at her, a childish sort of twist to his mouth, a cross between _I’m dreadfully sorry_ and _It’ll probably happen again_. Much to Ronan’s surprise, Maura smiled back at him. 

_Where were you?_ Ronan wanted to ask. He’d stayed up late last night dreaming of where Adam might be, knowing the room across their tiny shared bathroom was empty. Ronan had stayed up and waited, left the windows of his bedroom unlocked on the off-chance Adam might come back, drunk, needy, come to find him in the night.

Ronan must have drifted to sleep at some point, because he hadn’t heard Adam return.

Adam was still watching him. Ronan willed himself to breath, hoped beyond belief that his face wasn’t tinted pink. 

Did Adam know where he’d been? Could he smell it on him? Adam’s gaze was an inscrutable thing. 

“I’ve had a call from Sirmione,” Gansey said, addressing the table.

“Oh?” Adam sat up in his chair, egg forgotten. 

“Yes! They say they’ve found something,” Gansey continued, folding up his paper and putting it next to his breakfast plate.

“Was that Mallory on the phone?” Blue asked, picking up Gansey’s discarded paper and flipping to the comics section.

“It was,” Gansey said. “He asked me to come down after breakfast. You’ll come.” He addressed the last bit to Adam. It wasn’t really a question. 

Adam nodded enthusiastically, wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Which site is this Mallory at?”

“Grotte di Catullo,” Gansey said as he stood and stretched.

“Wonderful!” Adam had also stood.

“Finish your food!” Maura groaned, though she was already cleaning up their plates, knowing they weren’t going to finish at all.

Both Adam and Gansey were chattering excitedly, heads tucked together, as they peeled away towards the house. Blue seemed to have forgotten Ronan was there, forgotten everything around her, nose pressed into the comics.

Ronan felt something catch in him, watching Blue ignore him, watching Adam and Gansey saunter into the dark interior of the house, the world around them fading to dull static noise. Ronan felt like a scarf left on a table at a restaurant. He felt like a thing, easily forgotten.

“I’m coming,” he blurted out. Blue looked up from the paper, raised an eyebrow at him, then went back to her comics. Gansey and Adam stopped in the door of the villa. Adam’s face was a dark mask. Ronan wondered if he was frowning, wondered if that wrinkle between his eyebrows was irritation, hoped it might be something else. 

Gansey stepped back into the light of the day. He was smiling, no less excited than a moment before, as if folding Ronan in his world was his only true passion. “Of course you are,” he chirped. 

It was an hour later when Ronan made his way to the carport. Adam was there, shirt the same billowy blue as the first day. Ronan remembered that day like he’d memorized the red imprint of Adam’s knuckles. 

Just as on that day, Adam’s profile was a strong, defined line. His hands were in his pockets, now, legs bare up to the knee, something Ronan found very boyish.

Gansey’s orange Camero sat in the sun, sparkling, enticing. Noah must have brought it around. 

Adam was looking at it as Ronan approached. 

Adam flicked his gaze up, across the expanse of the hood. 

“1973,” Adam intoned. He said it in such a way that he could have been saying anything to anyone. Ronan might have been a stranger on the street. Ronan might not have been there at all.

“Pig,” Ronan said, having nothing else to respond with.

That got Adam’s attention. He looked up. Something was pinched in his face, as if he found this situation, their closeness, Ronan in general, to be distasteful. “Excuse me?”

“Dick calls it the Pig.”

“Oh.” Adam’s face relaxed, if only infinitesimally. 

A searing silence. Where was Gansey? Ronan looked back to the villa. Why had he insisted on coming? Was he so desperate to be included? Was he dying to find out how much Adam hated him? Was he trying to punish himself?

“Do you think he’ll let me drive it?”

Ronan snorted, looked back at Adam. “Dick doesn’t let anyone drive the Pig.”

“Oh, really?”

Adam’s arm was against the top of the car now. He was leaning across the roof so he might better stare at Ronan. 

His gaze was a heavy thing. 

Ronan opened the door to the car. “Really.” He slid into the backseat, slammed the door closed behind him so that the car rocked with it. He heard Adam chuckle through the open window. 

Ronan’s face tinged pink.

“Ready?” Gansey’s voice came, sometime later.

Adam started to climb into the passenger seat. 

“What are you doing? You’re driving!”

Ronan bolted upright from where he’d been laying in the backseat. “Are you kidding me?”

Gansey was climbing into the passenger seat. “What? You love cars, don’t you Adam?”

“That’s right,” Adam said, climbing in through the driver’s side.

“You never let me drive.” Ronan knew he sounded childish, could hear the annoying whine of his tone, but couldn’t understand why Gansey was letting this stranger, _Adam_ , drive his precious Pig.

“And why is that?” Gansey countered as he showed Adam how to jiggle the keys _just right_ to get the car to start.

“You hate me?” Ronan guessed, unkindly. 

“Untrue. What happened to your father’s beautiful BMW the last time I let you drive it?” 

The Pig roared to life under Adam’s hands. Gansey beamed. 

“Whatever,” Ronan groaned, slumping back against the leather seats. He looked up just then, into the rearview mirror. Adam’s eyes were there, watching him. After a beat, their gazes heavy with something unnamable, Adam smirked at him. _Smirked!_

Ronan scowled, looked away. The car surged below him, and they were off.

_Why am I here?_

 

Sirmione sat on the southern coast of Lake Garda. Mallory led them to the northern most tip, through the jagged edges of the peninsula, out towards Grotte di Catullo. 

The ruins were bleached a bright yellow from the endless Mediterranean sun. They walked past the crumbled shells of buildings, the toppled edge of a courtyard. Ronan knew the rumors of this place, that Catullus himself once roamed this bygone villa. 

Ronan knew the truth, of course, that Catullus had never stepped foot in this lodging, having died nearly 200 years prior to its construction. Catullus had once had a villa in the area, but that was in the 1st century BC. Ronan had Gansey to thank for that knowledge.

As they pressed towards the beach, where Mallory’s boat sat prickling and beaming in the light, Ronan thought of Catullus lounging in the sun here, his skin taut and bronzed. He thought of the poet mastering his craft beneath the olive trees, bathing naked in the warm, crystal waters. He thought of Adam, who he could just see through the swirling archways in front of him, blue shirt billowing in a faint breeze.

As he watched Adam bend into conversation with Gansey and Mallory, brow furrowed in a way Ronan could only name as scholarly, a poem came to him, from a book read long ago.

_Iuventius, if I were always allowed_  
to kiss your honey-sweet eyes,  
I might kiss you three hundred  
thousand times, and never be sated,  
not even if my kisses were more  
than the crop’s ripe ears of wheat.  


At the beach, Mallory showed Gansey and Adam three beautiful bronze statues, all life size. Their bodies were in fragments, laid out against the white sand of the beach. Ronan watched the three of them pace along the pieces, admiring, silent, in awe.

Ronan drifted to one of the statues, a nude of a man with two missing arms. The torso was a serpentine green, rusted and beautiful.

Ronan knelt beside the torso and ran the tips of his fingers between the divot of its pectorals. 

He felt Adam arrive, felt Adam watch him, calmly, and felt him kneel just on the other side of the statue. 

Ronan could hear Gansey and Mallory discussing the sculptor somewhere to his right, but otherwise, he and Adam were alone. 

“It’s beautiful,” Ronan muttered, unhindered beneath the midday sun. Adam hummed in something that sounded like agreement, or maybe contentment, but he did not speak. Ronan yearned to look up at him, to see if he’d find steel gray eyes, unblinking, consuming, but he kept his head down, focused on the green rusting around the edges of the rest of the statue’s muscles. 

Finally, as if Adam couldn’t bear the silence, the avoidance, “Ronan.”

Ronan only allowed himself to look up then, as if naturally responding to the utterance of his name. “Yes?”

Again, the quiet that felt thick with something unsaid. Did Adam wish to tell him off? Ronan almost hoped he would. At least then he would know. At least then it could be over with. 

But it was just quiet, the same quiet as always, and Adam’s eyes. Eventually the unsaid words ebbed into something else, into a small smile that started at the corner of Adam’s mouth, and eventually it was a small smile that started in Ronan’s eyes, and suddenly, so suddenly, they were laughing together. 

“Adam,” Ronan finally said, letting the name linger, tasting it for what it was. 

“Yes?” 

They laughed again.

It concluded with a hand, Adam’s, extended over the torso of the statue, and Ronan’s tentatively responding with his own hand. An unspoken apology. An even quieter forgiveness.

Had that been why Adam smirked at him earlier in the car? Was he looking for a bridge back to Ronan, just as Ronan had been searching for a bridge back to him?

 

That night Adam ate dinner with them for the first time in a week. Maura was pleased, though he didn’t stay for drinks after, even when Gansey insisted he stay for _just one grappa_. Adam, ever polite, ever casual, just shook his head and took off on Noah’s bike, a belated _Later!_ tossed over his shoulder.

When it was just Blue and Gansey and Ronan left, Maura saying goodnight early, they found themselves in the large family room, scrunched together on a large velvet couch. Gansey sat with his knees over Blue’s legs, and Ronan laid his head against Gansey’s thigh, head tucked against Gansey's chest.

For the first time since Adam arrived, Ronan felt still enough to let himself enjoy the closeness of another human, of Gansey and Blue. 

Blue ran her hands through his hair. She was reading a book in the dim light of the room. Gansey’s eyes were closed. 

Ronan briefly let himself wonder about the afternoon, what it truly meant. Were he and Adam at peace again? Would things go back to normal? Would Adam join him in the sweltering sun by the pool? Would they share their days together once more?

The incessant questioning and need to know died away when Gansey asked Blue to read out loud.

He’d never admit it, but Ronan loved listening to Blue read. 

She read a German fairytale in the original German, which she then translated to Italian. The story was of a young knight who was madly in love with a princess, who also loved the knight but was not aware that she did. Despite their friendship, the prince found himself unable to bring up the subject of his love. One day, he finally asked the princess, “Is it better to speak or die?”

Ronan closes his eyes and felt himself floating on his back in the pool. Adam stood above him. He wanted to ask it. He wanted to know. _Is it better to speak, or die?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi there, here's another chapter! Sorry for the delay. I hope you enjoy! Unbeta'd. 
> 
> ...As a side note, I may or may not have outlined the first 10 chapters of another Pynch AU...
> 
> Last thing. I made a Spotify playlist for this fic. Check out all the songs [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/chelsearowan10/playlist/0EpzjD2uWPzZADs1OBKiHI) and let me know what you think (:
> 
> My [tumblr.](https://onthesea-mystery.tumblr.com/)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi all, I know there have been some explicit-y things prior, but did want to warn that the first part of this chapter is nsfw. <3

_Oh, oh woe is me_  
_The first time that you touched me_  
_Oh, will wonders ever cease?_  
_Blessed be the mystery of love_  
  
Mysteries of Love — Sufjan Stevens

—

July. The heat of summer. The heat of Ronan.

Sirmione had only been the beginning of it, the slow, deep swelter that took hold of him. 

Adam, always gone just before dawn, or just after supper. Adam, laying below him on that yellow blanket. Adam, in the mornings, using the bathroom just beyond Ronan’s door. 

Ronan could barely keep his head straight—he was losing himself to some foggy notion of desire, something so heavy he could taste it if he held his mouth open long enough. 

He knew that Adam no longer saw Orla. She stopped coming around as much, and when she was around, she didn’t ask about him. Noah told Ronan she was distraught. Noah told Ronan that there were others, in town, at the discotheques, the neighbors. This series of crushes, or whatever Adam considered them, told Ronan only one important thing—his cock had been everywhere in Crema. 

Ronan rolled over in his bed, head shoved up against his pillow. He let out a loud sigh. 

He imagined it. Adam was dancing and there was a woman, some faceless woman. She had her hand down the back of his pants. He was cupping her ass. Ronan imagined Adam pulling her closer, tongue sliding out, tongue sliding in. Ronan imagined it.

He groaned, flopped on his back.

It was warm and still. 

The French doors that led to the balcony hung open. There was no breeze, no noises. It was nearly midday.

Ronan woke later and later nowadays, uncertain, unmotivated. He hadn’t touched his music in what felt like weeks. He could find zero reason to care, not with Adam just beyond the door, not with Adam god knows where. 

_Where are you?_ he yearned to ask. To say it out loud might remove some of his listlessness. Anything to absolve him.

What had Sirmione meant? What had their hands meant, clasped together over the bronze torso? Was it only forgiveness? Or was it a doorway, opening? Did Adam leave his door unlocked at night?

Another groan. Ronan swung his head around lazily, ran his forearm over his eyes. That’s when he spotted it, through the crack in the bathroom door. The red bathing suit. 

_Adam’s red bathing suit._

It was looped around the handle on the side of Ronan’s door that faced into the bathroom. He could see it was still damp from a swim that must have happened near dawn. 

Ronan sat up, moved to the opposite end of the bed, and laid on his stomach there, looking at the bathing suit through the door. 

It was so close. If he reached out, he could touch it. He could pull it to his face without ever unlooping it from the door.

Something stirred in him, wild and heated, and he pressed himself into the bed, as if to diminish the sudden sensation that riled in his stomach. But the friction sparked, fanned what was a whispering flame into something much stronger. A fire.

He couldn’t help it, didn’t want to. He pressed himself against the bed again, head falling between his shoulders. A low, guttural noise fluttered at the back of his throat. 

What was he doing?

Anyone could walk in at any time. Adam might walk in. _Adam_.

Another roll of his hips. The sheets rucked around his lower body, but the heat was no longer sweltering—he craved it, the suffocating push of it, the way it skirted across his bare chest, lower, _lower_.

_Adam._

The friction of the bed wasn’t enough. He flipped onto his back and began palming himself through his own bathing suit. He was incredibly hard, gasping, caution and willpower forgotten.

He dipped his head back off the edge of the bed, right hand snaking backwards, fingers looping into the damp fabric. He pulled the fabric to his face, his eyes fluttering closed, left hand wandering below the waste of his swimsuit.

Beneath the dampness, Ronan could smell him.

He pushed the fabric to his nose, hard, inhaled. Below, his hand worked feverishly, desperately. 

What Ronan wouldn’t do for this to be the real scent, for this to be Adam pressed into his face, damp fabric turned into prickly hair. _Find me here_. He moaned, mouth open. _Find me now._

He was close. Hopelessly so. 

He inhaled again.

He opened his mouth again, the edge approaching—

Somewhere close, dangerously so, a door banged open.

“Ronan?”

It was Adam, through the closed door of his side of the bathroom. Ronan immediately dropped the bathing suit and shoved himself away from the bathroom door and up to the head of his bed.

Just as Ronan had settled into an inconspicuous position, book open over his face, praying he wasn’t as red as he felt, Adam burst into his room via their connected lavatory. 

“Didn’t you hear me call you?” Adam stood with his hand on the doorknob where his bathing suit hung, eyeing Ronan dubiously. 

Ronan pulled the book away from his face, schooled his expression into something smooth, placid. Otherwise he did not respond.

“Why aren’t you with the others at the beach?” He must have meant Blue and Gansey. Ronan had forgotten the beach trip was today.

Ronan refused to answer and simply shrugged his shoulders. Ronan could not breath, let alone form words. He was hardly keeping himself from putting his hands down his pants now that Adam was truly here.

The moments wore on, Adam staring at him, eyes roving unabashedly. 

When Ronan felt confident enough that he wouldn’t sob if he opened his mouth, he said, “Bad allergies.”

Adam’s eyebrow crinkled, but that was all. Ronan shrugged again. 

“What’s wrong?” Adam asked, leaning his shoulder on the bathroom door. Ronan watched his fingers play aimlessly on the fabric of his bathing suit. Ronan swallowed. “You’re upset,” Adam pressed.

Still no answer. Ronan tried to sit up, but the uncomfortable stiffness in his pants made it impossible without giving himself away. Surely Adam had noticed he was in nothing but a bathing suit. Surely Adam noticed how low the trunks sat around his hips, the awkward way Ronan had his legs. Surely he must know, the way his eyes tracked over Ronan’s collar bone, lower, to his navel…

“Want to go for a swim?” Adam asked, suddenly, always suddenly.

“Later, maybe.”

“Let’s go now.” Adam extended a hand. Ronan took it, only to spin himself off the edge of the bed away from Adam.

“Do we have to?” What Ronan wanted to say was _Stay. _This was the closest he’d ever come to pleading. _Just stay with me. Take that hand and run it across my chest. Take my suit off. I’ll be quiet. You know I will. Put your fingers inside of me_.__

__Surely Adam could see this. Surely Adam knew._ _

__“I’ll meet you downstairs.” And then he was gone._ _

__After Adam left, Ronan looked down at his crotch. There was dampness there. Ronan felt the dismay wash into him like a tidal wave. Had he seen? Of course he’d seen._ _

__

__They laid against the grass by the pool, side by side. Ronan’s mind was still hazy with the embarrassment of his own pre-cum, but Adam was nonplussed, maybe asleep._ _

__It was only when Adam stood up suddenly and sat on the edge of the pool, legs dangling in the water, did Ronan prop himself up by his arms, watching the muscles in Adam’s back._ _

__It was then, with Adam’s back to him, the sun pouring through the leaves, a song bird in the distance, that Ronan felt the day come alive. Or maybe it was himself. Or maybe he was losing his mind._ _

__Either way, it was then that he told Adam of Blue’s German fairytale, about the knight who doesn’t know whether to speak or to die._ _

__“Well?” Adam asked, voice as crisp as the first bite into an apple._ _

__“What?”_ _

__“Well, does he or doesn’t he?”_ _

__“The princess says it’s better to speak. But she’s cautious. Maybe there’s a trap.”_ _

__“So, does he speak?”_ _

__“No, he fucks it up.”_ _

__“Figures.”_ _

__Ronan played with a strand of grass. Plucked it. Twisted it around his fingers._ _

__“Listen,” Adam started, back still turned, stiff, unmoving. Ronan looked up, surprised by the uncertain lilt in Adam’s voice, the tinge of his accent. It was rare to hear it._ _

__Finally, as if making his mind up about something, Adam continued, “I need to pick something up in town."_ _

___Oh._ _ _

__“I can pick it up for you,” Ronan offered._ _

__A silent moment filled with nothing but the trickle of Adam’s feet kicking in the pool._ _

__“No,” Adam concluded. Ronan’s heart stuttered. “Let’s go together.”_ _

__“Now?”_ _

__“Do you have something better to do?”_ _

__“No.”_ _

__“Then let’s go.”_ _

__Their ride into town was an echo of their first trip together. Adam pushed them to pedal faster, then coasted them down long, sloping hills. They took the shortcut, as if pressed by some invisible pendulum, or desperate to go somewhere, anywhere, together, and now._ _

__They rod side by side, Ronan sneaking glances at Adam’s profile whenever he could. Adam’s face was alive with something frenzied. Alive at all, steel grey eyes as bright as Ronan had ever seen them._ _

__In town, they stopped at the Pharmacy. Adam hopped of his bike and handed it to Ronan while he went inside._ _

__When he came back out, he offered Ronan a cigarette, lit it for him, then took his bike back and walked it towards the center of the piazza. Together they smoked._ _

__“I thought you didn’t smoke,” Ronan finally said as they propped their bikes against the fence that encircled the war memorial in the center of the square._ _

__“I don’t,” Adam smirked around his answer, as if Ronan had learned something interesting about him. Adam peered up at the war memorial, took a long drag. “So. World War II, huh?”_ _

__The memorial was a hulking statue sat on top of a large earthen mound._ _

__“No, World War I,” Ronan corrected coolly. “You’d have to be 80 years old to have known anyone who fought there.”_ _

__“I’ve never even heard of the Battle of Piave.”_ _

__“It was one of the most lethal battles in World War I,” Ronan continued. Adam moved along the fence of the memorial away from him, looking skyward. “A hundred and seventy thousand people died.”_ _

__Ronan moved against the railing as well, the opposite direction from Adam. They watched each other from across the grass._ _

__“Is there anything you don’t know?” Adam asked with a smile. A genuine smile._ _

__Ronan might have smiled too, but he hung his head to hide the blush creeping up his neck instead. “I don't know anything,” Ronan said, self-deprecating, tossing his cigarette away, suddenly disinterested in it, this, Adam, the whole thing._ _

__Adam took another step along the railing. Ronan mimicked him. “You seem to know more than anyone else around here,” Adam continued, taking another drag of his cigarette._ _

__Ronan allowed himself a small smirk then, pausing, but did not look up from his hands, clasped over the fence. “If only you knew how little I know about the things that matter.”_ _

___Like you_._ _

__Adam straightened then, arms spread wide on the fence. He was looking at Ronan intensely, so intensely that Ronan was forced to look up, across, to find those eyes of his._ _

__“What things that matter?” Adam asked, suddenly very serious._ _

__Their gazes might have been glued to each other. Ronan realized that this was the point of no return. This was the moment he unlocked the cage in his chest. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so fearful._ _

__“You know what things.” He spoke clearly, if not a bit shy. Adam took a deep breath, moved onward along the fence, paused, moved again, then paused, looking at Ronan again._ _

__“Why are you telling me this?”_ _

__“Because I thought you should know.”_ _

__The confession was an oil spill. Adam would be caught in it, might drown in it. He wouldn’t have a chance._ _

__A beat of interminable tension._ _

__“Because you thought I should know?” Adam was fidgeting now, uncertainty radiating off him like the midday sun._ _

__“Because I wanted you to know.”_ _

__Adam just looked him._ _

__Ronan hung his head again, felt Adam move along the fence across from him, now hidden by the memorial._ _

__“Because I wanted you to know,” he whispered to himself, a prayer and admonishment._ _

__He lifted his head, looked up at the memorial. “Because I wanted you to know.”_ _

__He knew Adam could no longer hear him, and yet he said it anyway. Said it so that he knew it was true, so that the weight that held him down for so long could finally be lifted. A tautness replaced the frantic beat in his heart, a tautness that told him at least it was over with. At least now he knows._ _

__Ronan continued around the memorial until he met Adam at the back of it. They stopped, stared at each other, each with a hand on the fence._ _

__The confession felt unfinished in this moment. Ronan felt it in the composed structure of Adam’s face, the way he blinked slowly. Finally, Ronan broke his silence. “Because there is no I can say this to but you.”_ _

__Adam looked away, around the piazza. Ronan admired the straight line of his neck, the way his lips puckered around the end of his cigarette._ _

__When Adam finally turned back to him, his face was still inscrutable. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?_ _

__Ronan’s face flushed, right to the tips of his ears, but he still managed to nod._ _

__Adam looked away again. Ronan could not tell what he was thinking. He could never tell what he was thinking._ _

__“Don’t go anywhere,” Adam said, still avoiding Ronan’s eyes._ _

__“You know I’m not going anywhere, Adam.” A day for confessions. A day for laying his soul bare._ _

__Adam disappeared into the darkened doorway of an unmarked shop. Ronan moved back to the memorial, leaned against the railing._ _

__He was calm, despite everything, despite what might come next. He almost welcomed it, whatever it may be. It was like one chapter in his life was closing and another opening. This moment felt ripe with opportunity, or, at least ripe with change._ _

__When Adam came back, he was holding a stack of papers. “They messed up the pages. They’ll have to retype the whole thing,” he complained, waving the papers at Ronan, before tossing them into a nearby garbage can. “This sets me back a full day.”_ _

__He moved briskly past Ronan on the railing, towards where they propped their bikes. Ronan followed him, having nothing else to do now that he was found out._ _

__“Damn,” Adam cursed, picking up his bike._ _

__Ronan took hold of his bike as well. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”_ _

__Adam looked at him then. “Pretend you never did.”_ _

__“Does that mean we’re on speaking terms, but not really?”_ _

__Adam bristled. “It means,” he said, wheeling his bike directly next to Ronan, barely any space between them, “we can’t talk about those things. Okay?”_ _

__He was right, of course. Ronan knew that. He nodded._ _

__“We just can’t,” Adam added, as if Ronan needed any more explanation._ _

__Ronan hopped on his bike, then, adrenaline of a different kind, pulsing through him._ _

__Adam was afraid._ _

__

__The ride back to the villa was calmer, as if neither of them wanted the afternoon to come to an end. Ronan had never seen Adam so peaceful. He liked this version of Adam and didn’t want to say goodbye to him so soon, didn’t want them to arrive home and lose him all over again._ _

__Before he could think twice about it, Ronan turned them off the main road and down a dirt path. Adam followed without questioning. He too seemed to be looking for a way to extend their time together, or at least the afternoon._ _

__When Ronan heard the trickling of water, he hopped of his bike and tossed it to the ground, pulling off his shoes and dumping them in the grass as well. Adam was close behind, and followed suit._ _

__Ronan brought them through a small cluster of trees, which opened to a small dip in the earth, where a makeshift set of stairs sat expectantly. At the bottom of the stairs, a small stream._ _

__Ronan took the stairs two at a time, and then jumped into the shallow water. It was startlingly cold, as it always was. He turned to watch Adam on the bank._ _

__“This is my spot,” he confided, feeling braver than he ever had._ _

__Adam had his hands on his hips, inspecting Ronan from above. Finally, he took the steps down into the water._ _

__“Oh!” Adam cried as his feet found purchase on the smooth rocks. “It’s freezing!”_ _

__Ronan grinned at him and waded deeper. “The water is directly from the mountains.” Ronan pointed over Adam’s shoulder to the cluster of mountainous shadows in the distance._ _

__Adam waded further into the water, silently cursing. Ronan kicked water at him. Adam laughed and kicked water back._ _

__They waded for a while, the comfortable quiet of the afternoon became a third body with them. Adam stretched and let the sun kiss his face, opened his arms wide to the canopy of trees above._ _

__“I like the way you say things,” Adam said, almost whispered. His back was to Ronan, but he sounded almost reverent. “I don’t know why you put yourself down.”_ _

__“So you won’t,” Ronan admitted._ _

__Adam turned to him, face tinged with confusion. “Are you really that afraid of what I think?”_ _

__Ronan looked down briefly, then back up. Adam was still watching him. Ronan, still feeling some wild, unhinged bravery in him, stepped closer. Then closer still. Adam startled, but did not step away._ _

__Ronan smiled up at him, a freeing thing._ _

__Adam smiled back, shaking his head. “You’re really making this difficult for me.”_ _

__And then Adam was gone, to the bank of the stream, laying on his back in the sun._ _

__Ronan joined him and they laid there in silence for an eternity._ _

__Sometime later, as the sun dipped lower beneath the trees, Adam shifted. Ronan kept his eyes closed, as if he was sleeping, as if this meant they could stay here longer._ _

__But Adam wasn’t getting up. He shifted closer to Ronan, propped up on his elbow, hovered over him, so close._ _

__Then, as light as a feather, Adam’s fingers grazed against Ronan’s lips. Ronan’s mouth fell open in a silent moan, as if Adam had willed it to be. The pad of Adam’s thumb coursed over his bottom lip, _slow, slow, slow.__ _

__Daringly, Ronan let his tongue slide out of his mouth, ghosted it across Adam’s finger. Adam stilled and Ronan opened his eyes._ _

__Above him, Adam’s gaze was a heavy, insatiable thing. Ronan felt the fire alive in him, felt it consume him._ _

__Recklessly he took hold of Adam’s wrist and guided two of Adam’s fingers into his mouth. His lips closed around them. His eyes fluttered closed._ _

__How many times had he dreamt of this? Was this a dream now? Had he fallen asleep and drifted into some passion infused dreamscape?_ _

__No, this wasn’t a dream. Adam has sucked in a breath above him, a moan of his own, before pulling his fingers away. Ronan sat up, following the fingers, desperate for more._ _

__Adam dipped his head in. Their foreheads touched. They were smiling like boys._ _

__Ronan, the brazen creature he had become, licked his way across Adam’s lips. Adam shuddered, eyes falling closed, mouth falling open. Ronan wanted to kiss him, and so he did._ _

__It was unlike every dream, so much better than any fantasy. Because it was real. And Adam wasn’t pushing him away, wasn’t spitting at him in disgust._ _

__Adam’s tongue met Ronan’s with equal fervor. Ronan smiled._ _

__Too soon, Adam pulled away. “Better now?” he asked with a smirk, leaning back on his hands, as if all Ronan needed was a taste. Ronan was starving. He was ravenous._ _

__Ronan knew what he must look like. Heavy breathing, red faced, lips plush and kissable._ _

__Ronan huffed out a bark of laugh and climbed into Adam’s lap, captured his lips, held his face in his hands. Adam responded at first, then pulled back._ _

__“No, no, no, no, no,” he chided, pushing Ronan off of him. “We should go.”_ _

__“Why?” Ronan asked, childishly. He knew Adam wanted him, could feel it in the way Adam’s eyes lingered on his lips. _Why won’t you kiss me?__ _

__“I know myself, okay?” This was Adam, stern, suddenly cold. “We’ve been good. We haven’t done anything to be ashamed of.”_ _

__Ronan laughed cruelly, splayed himself on the hot earth, frustration welling up in him, untamable._ _

__“I want to be good, okay?” Adam sounded pleading. Ronan closed his eyes against it. Could he blame Adam for his fear? Could he blame himself for the same fear? Right now he felt invincible, but what about tonight? What about when Gansey and Blue looked at him and knew what he’d done?_ _

__Would he feel so confident then?_ _

__He opened his eyes. Adam was standing, walking to their bikes, but paused to look over his shoulder at Ronan._ _

__“Are you coming?”_ _

__Ronan nodded, and followed. He felt like a river had been stoppered inside of him._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi all, hope you enjoyed. I know this is one of the longer chapters, but these are some of my favorite scenes from the movie, absolutely perfect, and I couldn't resist (: 
> 
> Let me know your thoughts! I love hearing from you. Things are finally starting to heat up. This is when the writing becomes easy for me. 
> 
> My [tumblr](https://onthesea-mystery.tumblr.com/).
> 
> [Fic playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/chelsearowan10/playlist/0EpzjD2uWPzZADs1OBKiHI), if you're interested.


	8. Chapter 8

_Kept you like a seed_  
_Grew love like trees_  
_‘til they burn_  
_They burn_  
  
Cut Love — Hayden Calnin

—

Adam stayed for dinner that night. Ronan was surprised, though pleased. Even more pleased when Adam sat directly next to him, so close their legs touched beneath the table.

Across from them sat Maura and her close friend from town, Calla. They bickered wickedly about Breton’s _Manifeste du surréalisme_.

“Ask the American,” Calla exclaimed, throwing her hands up, “if he believes surrealist automatism is in anyway related to the art of divination. Or any prophetic ability for that matter!”

Blue tsked loudly from the other end of the table and Maura made a noise that sounded dangerously close to _Pshaw!_ Adam’s brow was crumpled in both confusion and modesty. 

“I’m not familiar with surrealist automatism, ma’am,” Adam confessed. Below the table, his foot inched over Ronan’s. It had slipped out of his shoe and was bare and warm and heavy. Ronan had to force himself not to smile, bit into his salad instead.

“He called me _ma’am_!” Calla clucked, tossing her hands up again.

“Really,” Blue admonished her, spearing a pear off her plate quite murderously.

“Don’t stab your food,” Maura chastised Blue, then turned back to Calla. “And don’t bring the American into this.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” Adam offered quietly, politely. 

“Excuse me for thinking he might have an opinion,” Calla hissed, ignoring him.

“An opinion on psychic abilities! On Breton!” Maura all but laughed. 

Ronan looked at Adam then, checking that he wasn’t offended, as Maura and Calla had the uncanny knack of offending anything alive when they were together, but Adam was smiling, just smiling, in a small way that made Ronan’s stomach flip. 

Ronan turned back to his plate. He felt his face warm under the realization that he was also grinning, enjoying Adam enjoying this. He felt their world’s touching, if only in a small way, but touching nonetheless.

As if to hide evidence of his grin, Ronan dabbed his mouth with his napkin. When he pulled it away, it was damp and red. As he looked at the red spot, which seeped further into the cloth as he held it, another red drop fell to accompany it. 

“Your nose is bleeding.” A warm hand on Ronan’s shoulder. Adam’s hand. Was that concern in Ronan heard in his voice?

Without responding, Ronan pressed the napkin to his nose and stood quickly, dashing from the table and into the house. 

Inside, he pulled a pack of ice from the ice chest and slumped against the wall of the pantry.

His head felt suddenly heavy and his vision was dotted with black stars. He closed his eyes, pressing the cool pack to the bridge of his nose, the napkin still pressed under his nostrils.

He sighed, content to melt into the earth if God would let him. 

“You’re dripping everywhere,” came a voice from above. Ronan slowly peeled his eyes open. Adam stood above him. Ronan couldn’t see his face. He was just a stark silhouette in the door frame, but Ronan would have been able to name the shape of Adam anywhere. 

“I’m not afraid of a little blood,” Ronan admitted quietly.

“No,” Adam said, moving into the pantry enough that Ronan could just make out his features, his bright eyes, the curve of his mouth. “The ice.”

Adam knelt beside him then and put his hand directly under the one Ronan used to hold his ice pack. Ronan could feel the melting ice slipping through his hand and into Adam’s. He wondered if this solved anything. He wondered if he cared.

An interminable moment passed where it was Adam holding Ronan’s hand holding the ice, both holding their breaths, both watching the other. 

Finally, Adam broke the silence. “Did I do this to you?”

Ronan breathed out a laugh. “No, this happens more often than I like to admit.”

“Bloody noses?”

“Bloody in general,” Ronan corrected. Then, as if to clear the air, as if to explain something about himself, Ronan shrugged. “Usually only have bloody noses at the hand of one of my brothers.”

Adam watched him cautiously from the side of his eye. “Brothers?”

Ronan nodded. Adam also slumped against the shelves in the pantry. This close, their legs became a tangled mess. Sensing this, Adam tugged both of Ronan’s legs over his own, let his hands wandered up and down Ronan’s calves.

“Where are they?”

Ronan thought for a moment, tried to remember the last place Declan had called from. “England, most likely. Declan travels for work. He’s Matthew’s legal guardian.”

“Is Gansey yours?”

Ronan watched the practiced way Adam held himself, the distant stare that said more than if he’d been watching Ronan raptly. 

“Yeah,” Ronan allowed. “It was easier that way. After Dad died.”

Adam’s hand stilled briefly, then resumed the soft stroking against his leg. Ronan wondered what Adam was thinking. And so he asked just that.

“What are you thinking?”

Adam turned then, smiled at him. “When’s the last time you saw them?”

Ronan _hmmed_ as Adam’s hands dipped lower on his leg, finding his left foot. He slowly began to crack each toe there, massaging his fingers into the calloused pads of Ronan’s feet.

“At the beginning of summer, maybe,” Ronan all but hummed. “They never stay long.”

“You don’t get along with them.”

“It’s complicated.” Ronan hissed as Adam cracked his big toe, then moved onto the next foot and repeated the process. 

It was Adam’s turn to _hmm_. “All families are complicated.”

“Is yours?”

“The most complicated,” Adam said around a sad smile. Ronan wanted to press him for more, but didn’t know how. 

Instead, he asked, “How did you learn how to do that?”

“An old girlfriend.”

The moments slipped by them. The quiet in the cupboard allowed them the hear the lulls in conversation from the back patio, the faint buzz of bugs preening in the tall grasses. 

In the cool darkness of the pantry, the slow swirls of Adam’s fingers around his toes became an unsaid prayer. Ronan’s head dipped forward, eyes closed and mouth parted as if he might betray himself, _them_ , with Adam’s name, a name whispered like a secret they both craved to loose on the world.

Ronan wanted to betray himself, wanted to reach out and touch the slip of Adam’s skin that he could see just below his neck, through the two open top buttons of his shirt. He wanted to scrape his nails there, provoking a temptation of the greatest kind, skin offering skin, skin offering pain, skin offering life. Maybe Adam would invoke his name then, whisper it like Ronan desired. 

Maybe Ronan didn’t want to be good, like Adam did. Maybe he wanted to imagine their whispers mingling until it became one sound, one utterance, until they became one person, one another. 

  
  


The summer dipped further in on itself. 

The villa became a quiet thing this time of year, as families disappeared to their next summer retreat, as the townspeople prepared themselves for the impending autumn, another winter. 

Ronan liked the villa most this time of year; the wild sun more forgiving and the cool rains brought a kiss of respite to otherwise sweltering afternoons.  
He had his guitar with him today, pressed into the grass beside him, but he was too busy watching Adam to want to play. 

Below the low wall on which Ronan sat, Adam was reading a book of poetry that Ronan had left on his pillow the night before. He wanted to say _Tell me your thoughts. Tell me you love them like I love them._

But the sight of it, the flimsy pages of Antonia Pozzi casting faint shadows over Adam’s sculpted jaw, the delicate way his lips moved as he read each word, the elegant line of his fingers as they turned each page, was enough to make Ronan weep with joy. 

Ronan picked up his guitar, then, letting his mind wander from faces and bodies and romantic poets to the celestial ebb of music that welled inside him. Bach’s _Zion hört die Wächter singen_ came naturally to him, a confession at the tips of his fingers. 

Adam shifted on his blanket, laid his book on his bare chest, and closed his eyes. Ronan paused, afraid he’d disturbed his reading.

“Don’t stop,” Adam whispered. 

Ronan felt a fire light in his chest, somewhere dangerously close to his heart. He pondered Adam, then put down his guitar in the grass, standing.

Adam cracked an eye, saw that Ronan stood, and propped himself up on an elbow. “Where are you going?”

“Come with me.” 

Ronan didn’t wait to see if Adam would follow, had a funny feeling he would have without being prompted, and walked back to the house. 

Inside the family room, Gansey’s large piano sat near an open window. Ronan slid onto the bench. He could feel Adam behind him, watching from the door to the patio. 

Ronan’s fingers hovered over the keys. Something tugged at him, something playful, something delicate.

His fingers moved, and again came the song he’d played on the guitar.

“What was that?” Adam asked, confused, when Ronan had finished. 

Ronan turned on the bench to smirk at him. “Well, I played it as if Litzst was interpreting Bach.”

“No,” Adam said, a little perplexed, a little indignantly, though humorously so. “Play what you played out there.” He pointed over his shoulder, back to the grass, as if Ronan could have possibly forgotten what he’d played and where and for whom.

“Oh!” Ronan exclaimed cheekily. “You wanted me to play that!”

“Yes!” Adam was trying not to smile, desperately so. 

“Right, right.” Ronan turned back to the piano, playing the song again. It was the same as before, but again different, a little harder this time, with more drama. His fingers bounced into the keys, his foot bobbed against the pedals.

When he finished, he looked at Adam again, still sporting that same, cheeky smirk. 

“What was _that_?” Adam asked, exasperated. “You changed it again!”

“Oh, I just played it as Busoni might have played it if he’d altered Liszt’s version.” Ronan let the bubble of pride well in his chest just a bit larger as he saw the admiration in Adam’s eyes. 

“Can’t you just play it how Bach wrote it?”

“But Bach never wrote it for the guitar,” Ronan shrugged. “It might not have been Bach who wrote it at all.”

“Forget I asked.” And just like that, Adam turned around, headed back outside to his blanket and his book and his sun.

“Alright, alright!” Ronan called after him. Adam poked his head back in the room, feigning annoyance. “This is Bach as transcribed by me. It’s a very early Bach, and he wrote it for his brother.”

The song came again, the same phrase as before, but it was sweeter than all three versions previously played, as if it had been made for Ronan’s fingers on this piano on this day for this audience. Adam drifted into the room, pulled off his sunglasses, and sat on the edge of the bench, watching and listening.

This was a gift Ronan was giving, a small token of himself he could only ever give to Adam. As they sat, arms touching arms, Bach breathing life into the room, Ronan realized what they had been doing, what they _were_ doing, and it lit him on fire.

They had been flirting.

 

When night fell, and Adam was gone as he usually was just after dinner, Ronan found the book of Antonia Pozzi poems on Adam’s nightstand, which was actually Ronan’s nightstand, and took it back through their shared bathroom and into the small bedroom that was his for the summer.

He opened the book to where Adam dogeared a page and read the poem there.

_Sotto tanto sole_  
_nella barca ristretta_  
_il brivido_  
_di sentire contro le mire ginocchia_  
_la nudita pura d’un fanciullo_  
_e l’ebbro strazio di covare nel sangue_  
_quello ch’egli non sa._

The night became an intolerable companion. Ronan felt intolerable himself, laying twisted in his sheets. It was cooler than normal and the hair on his arms stood on end, but he made no move to close the glass windows to the balcony, or even pull his covers up over his body.

He lay stark and unforgiving, witness to nothing but the dancing shadows on his ceiling. The moon was blue and creeping. Blue laughed from somewhere below.

The sound of a bike, skidding in gravel.

Ronan could not tell the time. Didn’t want to. He was laden and untouched and felt both heavenly and alone. Did Adam think he was just a boy to toy with, a body to admire? Did Adam think of him at all?

If he did, why did he leave tonight? Why, when Ronan’s balcony was also his own balcony? Why, when Ronan’s skin was begging to be Adam’s skin too?  
He recounted the poem again and felt it’s agony truer than the absence of Adam.

_Sun flooding_  
_the tight boat_  
_shudder_  
_against my knees_  
_of a boy’s_  
_pure_  
_nudity_  
_& the rapt_  
_agony_  
_hatching in the blood_  
_what he doesn’t_  
_know._

Time crept along slowly and Ronan begged for sleep. He knew it wouldn’t come, not until Adam returned. Not until he could feel his chest rising and falling in the next room. Would Adam return tonight? Would he come to find Ronan, finally?

Was Ronan anything but his longing, or had he completely devoted himself to Adam, even knowing he might never receive the same devotion in return?

He squeezed his eyes closed, tight, and ran an angry hand over his face. He could scream now. Wake the whole house. Gansey might even raise his voice at him.

But what was a scream into the eternal darkness of each eternal night that Adam did not come to him but a hollow, unanswered plea?

Eventually, when it became too still to bear, and the moon smiled wickedly at him through the open balcony doors, he slipped into a fever dream. Adam came to him in that dream, feed him dried apricots soaked in rum. He licked each of Adam’s fingers until Adam cried out Ronan’s name.

The next morning, it poured. And Adam was not in his room.

Breakfast was under the protection of a small roof on the back of the house. 

Gansey folded his crossword onto the table and Ronan filled in the last remaining answers. 

“Where’s Adam?” he asked casually.

“Did he come home last night?” Blue asked back, tapping her egg with her spoon.

Ronan shrugged and put the end of Gansey’s pen in his mouth, looking out into the lush greenery of the villa, now splattered with a damp blue rain. 

_Where’s Adam_ he yearned to ask again, to himself, to the world. _Where’s Adam?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi there! So so so sorry for the delay on this chapter. I'm not entirely happy with it, but wanted to post for ya'll to have something. I know it's been an agonizingly slow burn, but I promise the good stuff comes to those who wait! I'm sure you'll all like the next chapter very much...anyway, as always, thank you for your support.
> 
> Find me on [tumblr.](http://onthesea-mystery.tumblr.com)
> 
> Fic [soundtrack.](https://open.spotify.com/user/chelsearowan10/playlist/0EpzjD2uWPzZADs1OBKiHI?si=xa6F4LCESlKlSxlfkieqyg)


	9. Chapter 9

_It’s been a long, long time_  
_Since I’ve memorized your face_  
_It’s been four hours now_  
_Since I’ve wandered through your place_  
  
Futile Devices — Sufjan Stevens

—

It shouldn’t have hurt when Adam disappeared again, and yet it was a pain as tall as a tidal wave.

The days after the nose bleed were filled with rain, sometimes lazy and slow, but mostly frantic and unrelenting. Ronan would sit in the window seat of Gansey’s office, music propped against his knees, listening. Sometimes to the rain, but mostly for the familiar tread of feet from above. It never came.

Gansey sensed his listlessness, prodded at him as he always did, but there was nothing to say. Ronan was stuck in an unforgiving limbo.

Where did Adam go when he went away? Asking Gansey was a mistake, when he finally did ask, because the textbook curiosity after Ronan’s wellbeing transformed into worry, which meant that Blue knew Ronan was upset, which meant Maura knew as well.

It became impossible to be in rooms with them, their guarded stares and pointed silences, as if they hoped he’d open up to them if only they pretended not to know he was in pain.

His room was out of the question—everything there reminded him of Adam. Their shared bathroom, the red bathing suit hanging from the doorknob, the door separating their room, perpetually unlocked, perpetually waiting.

He took to laying on the small bench in the entry way, or hiding in the attic, where there was a small radio he sometimes listened to to pass the time. 

But still, the rain, ceaseless in it’s pounding. Ceaseless in the reminder that wherever Adam had gone, he’d been gone for days. 

There was no sign of him at dinners. Maura stopped laying his place setting anymore. No one spoke of it, of course; Adam was a grown man, and there were no rules when it came to the villa. Adam could come and go as he pleased, whenever the whimsy took him.

Ronan knew all of this. It had always been the case with all the other academics who joined them in summer’s past. And yet he felt Adam’s disappearance like and old wound once forgotten, only to ache again as the weather changed.

It was silly to hope…to be brave. To think, after everything, that their relationship would shift into something new. But this wasn’t a relationship, of course it wasn’t. It was nothing to Adam. Ronan was nothing.

Why choose Ronan, when there was Orla? Why choose Ronan, when there was all of Crema, every beautiful woman with their full bosoms and perfectly shaped lips? Ronan was only _just_ eighteen, a _child_ in comparison to everything Adam could choose from. Of course he would disappear. Flee now, before Ronan sunk his nails in too deep.

And yet, he yearned.

Back pressed to the cool, damp stone of the patio, Ronan panted with a lust unbridled. The air was sticky warm, the rain more mist than droplets, and Ronan’s pale skin was coated in wet, both sweat and precipitation. 

_Come home_ he wanted to say. _Come back to me._

Blue found him there hours later, when the rain finally stopped. She placed a cool glass of lemonade by his head and dabbed his forehead with a dry cloth. He felt silly and young and desperate for affection. He rolled onto his side, buried his face in her thigh, and let out a shaky breath.

“Where is he?” he whispered. With his face hidden as it was, with it only being Blue, Ronan was sure enough to ask. Blue sighed above him, ran her hand along his shoulder, but ultimately said nothing. 

They sat like that for sometime in the quiet drifting dusk. There were soon the noises of bugs chipping in the trees. 

Only when the yellow sky faded into pale pink did Blue speak. “Amore senza sofferenza è molto raro.”

Ronan rolled onto his back, studied the canopy of trees above them. Was this love? Did all love hurt as this hurt, a needle dug into skin and forgotten there? If he was to suffer in love, Ronan wasn’t sure he wanted it at all.

 

With the end of the rain came a swelter so thick it was like second skin. 

Ronan woke covered in sweat, sheets sticky against his bare thighs. He lay there, felt the beads of sweat roll over his temples and begged silently for a breeze. 

In the haze of early morning—this was the earliest he’d woken in days—Ronan could just make out the sound of water trickling. It was a funny sound to hear, for some reason, so close and yet unfamiliar in a way that made him close his eyes.

He listened against the quiet, let his hand roam to the morning stiffness beneath the sheets. He tugged at himself lazily, for want of anything better to do in the unmanageable heat, when he realized what the noise was.

His eyes flew open. 

He sat up, glared at the closed door to the bathroom. 

It was undoubtably the shower. It was undoubtably Adam.

Ronan leapt from his bed and pulled on his swim trunks. He paced, let the slow fall of water lull his sudden spike of anxiety into a manageable throb. It had been a week. Seven full days since there was any sign Adam existed. Ronan had started to think he made the whole summer up, that maybe, _maybe_ he had dreamed Adam.

But no. That was the shower and Ronan could just picture Adam’s curved shoulders under the spray of water. He walked to the bathroom door, put his forehead against the wood, closed his eyes. Waited. Hoped. _Open the door. Tell me to join you. I’d beg, if you let me._

When it became too much to bear, their closeness that was actually distance, Ronan went to his desk and composed the words he wished to say to Adam if he were as brave as he’d been on the day they kissed.

_Please don’t avoid me. It’s killing me._

_Your silence is killing me._

_I’d sooner die than know you hate me._

Each more desperate than the last. Ronan crumpled them all, tossed them into the waste basket. 

Finally, he landed on this: _Can’t stand the silence. I need to speak to you._

Before he could think twice, before his doubt and fears mingled and stilled his hand, Ronan ripped the words from his journal, folded the page in half, and sent it under their shared door. 

It was at breakfast, as he dipped his spoon into his soft boiled egg, yolk sloshing down the side of the egg cup, that the first wave of regret hit him. His words had been naive in their construction, admittedly, but true nonetheless. To be laid so bare after being scorned so cruelly was a humiliation unlike any Ronan had ever felt. 

It was worsened by Adam’s avoidance of the breakfast table—he came by, of course, to grab a glass of apricot juice, and Gansey jumped up to follow him to his preferred spot by the swimming hole, but not once did he look Ronan’s way. No words uttered. It was as if Ronan didn’t exist at all. Maybe he didn’t, not in any meaningful way.

Ronan tried desperately not to watch Adam and Gansey together by the water, smiling and laughing, careless and intimate and tan, horribly tan. Blue placed her hand over his on the table. It took all Ronan’s strength not to pull it away.

The second wave of regret hit him when he went back to his room after breakfast to find a note neatly folded on top of his books. He suspected the response would be casual, as everything about Adam was. Maybe _I think you dropped this, later!_. Or maybe not casual, but cold. Adam was cut from stone, after all, and why should he be anything else to Ronan? The cold Adam would say something like _No reply._

Ronan took the note and opened it. 

In the fine, scratchy scrawl Ronan came to know these past weeks: _Grow up. I’ll see you at midnight._

His heart surged.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> horribly apologetic about the delay in this chapter. i hope you're still interested in the story...i'm finding my love for it again. as always, thank you for your kind words. i love hearing from all of you. unbeta'd.
> 
> come find me on [tumblr](https://onthesea-mystery.tumblr.com/) <3


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay, this is super nsfw for all ya'll who need to know.

_And I'm kissing you lying in my room_  
_Holding you until you fall asleep_  
_And it's just as good as I knew it would be_  
_Stay with me I don't want you to leave_  
  
K. — Rosie Carney

—

Ronan called Noah just after ten and waited for him under the crooked apricot tree.

The shadow came shortly after, muted and blue and shaped like a boy he’d come to know intimately. Ronan’s eyes flicked open. Noah peered at him through crisp blue eyes. 

“You’re sweating,” Noah said, sliding down to his knees so he was next to Ronan on the ground. Ronan reached up, let his fingers stroke the edge of Noah’s face. 

“Touch me,” he said, and Noah did. He kissed Ronan behind his ears, licked away a bead of sweat from below his nipple. They laid there together, in the sun, in the heat, melted limbs and skin so wet it was hard to say where one boy stopped and another began.

Ronan liked having Noah this close—it was sturdy and sure and Noah was attentive in ways Ronan never knew he’d crave. There were small sounds, hums and sighs, and a foot reached out so toes ran along soles. 

Ronan turned his head, watched Noah dosing in the heat. His skin was splotchy tan, dotted with disproportionate freckles, hair sandy and short. Ronan pushed his fingers into Noah’s hair, ran the pads of his fingers over Noah’s scalp. 

“Mmm,” Noah hummed, turned and pressed his head into the touch. “What time is it?”

Ronan drew his arm away, tossed it over his eyes, peaked through fingers towards the sun. “Nearly one,” he guessed. “Do you want lunch?”

“Mmm, _no._ ” Noah made that sound at the back of his throat again, the contented one, so warm and lusty and sated. “I have a better idea.”

“Oh?” Ronan felt Noah’s words from his navel down to the tips of his toes. If Noah opened his eyes right now, he’d see just how red Ronan’s face had gone, just how pink the tips of his ears were.

“Yes.” Noah rolled onto his stomach, pressed his body into the earth in a way that Ronan thought must be illegal. Ronan watched him do it again, then once more, from under his arm. Noah grinned devilishly at him. 

Ronan thought of Adam, then, thought of _midnight_ , felt the world tilt off axis, felt his stomach flip twice in quick succession. Noah was here, in front of him, ready, willing, and Ronan felt the same desire building to meet his head on, and yet there was _midnight._

What was he to expect? The doubt was back, now, painted across his skin so that it burned when Noah laid his hand on his bare chest. What would Adam say to him? _Grow up! Move on! Get over it!_

But why wait until midnight for a conversation like that? Why not set Ronan straight as soon as possible? Why wait for the satiny blue of twilight?

Noah’s hand was moving lower on his chest now, dragging, slow and sensual. Noah was half on top of him, breathing heavy into his ear, _please_ and _yes_ and _touch me_. Ronan groaned from under him, let his arms circle shoulders, skip across the fine lines of his back, lower and lower, until fingers pushed under shorts, into flesh, groping, kneading.

It was Noah’s turn to groan, and he did it into Ronan’s mouth. 

Later, when they were truly sated and sticky, after they napped in each other’s arms, Ronan drug Noah to the swimming hole on the off chance that they’d find Adam there.

But they were alone, and so Noah pulled him into the water and they raced back and forth, splashing and floating and cradling one another when they were certain no one was looking.

It must have been past two when Ronan’s pulse started skipping. He heard Maura’s voice, and Adam’s, from the patio. Adam sounded cool and serious and patient, Maura fervent and flippant. She was explaining to him the perfect way to juice a lemon. Ronan folded his arms on the warm yellow stone of the swimming hole and closed his eyes, let their conversation waft through trees and across the tall grass and over the trickling from the fountain.

Noah swam next to him, wrapped legs around his waist, and kissed him open mouth along the shell of his ear. 

Ronan willed Adam to walk through the brush and find them like this, tangled and tan and _so close_. He willed Adam to join them, to lick hot stripes across his temple, to put his fingers past Ronan’s open lips…

“I could go again,” Noah whispered, thick and hot, into his ear. Ronan swallowed, then pulled himself out of the swimming hole, laid bare back against the hot brick.

Noah shrugged, pushed against the wall and started doing laps again, just as Adam rounded the trees and saw them. 

Noah didn’t pause in his swimming, and Ronan managed and unaffected glance at Adam as he came closer.

Ronan wondered how we was supposed to act, just now. Excited, perhaps, for their rendezvous in less than twelve hours? Or blasé, as if moonlit meetings were normal for him? He couldn’t help how his heart beat wildly against his chest, how his pulse drummed unpleasantly in his ears. Adam sat beside his feet, dipped his legs into the blue water. 

Without looking at Ronan, “You two look like you’re having fun.”

Ronan was grateful for the heat of the day, grateful to have an excuse for how red his skin must look. He shrugged, not daring to speak, and closed his eyes. 

It was still in the following moments, except for the sounds of Noah treading water back and forth, back and forth. Ronan pressed himself as hard against the stone as he could, for fear he might let his leg stretch out, lay across Adam’s thighs.

“Hey.”

Ronan’s body betrayed him and he inched his foot out until toes touched a damp swim suit. His eyes fluttered open. Adam didn’t look at him, but his hands were fists in his lap.

“Yes?” Ronan asked, heat rising rising rising, until he was forced to pull his foot back, to sit up, before his body didn’t something he couldn’t reverse.

“What have you two been doing?” Again, no eye contact, just a sentence spoken to clasped hands. 

Adam was so sharp, Ronan noticed, thin and spindly and the deepest tan. Ronan wanted to tell him, then, that he had his fingers inside Noah just an hour ago. He wanted Adam’s jealousy. He wanted Adam to look at him.

But he kept his mouth shut tight, looked into the water where Noah had stopped swimming and was hovering against the opposite wall, watching the pair of them.

“Let’s go,” Ronan said. Only then did Adam whip his gaze to him. “Noah.”

Noah swam to him, hoisted himself out of the water, and followed after Ronan as he made his way across the grounds.

Ronan knew that if he stayed there a moment longer he wouldn’t be able to control himself. He wasn’t to be trusted, so close to Adam. 

They went to the tennis courts and played for hours. The sun scorched their skin until it was impossible to stand up straight anymore and they collapsed into the soft grass beneath the shady olive branches and Maura brought them lemonade and dates. It was quiet at the villa these days, this late into the summer. 

The neighbors were off on their own vacations and the town was empty aside from the locals and Ronan and Gansey and Blue. 

Ronan preferred this quiet, the way his mind went numb with it, just as it went numb when Adam spoke to him, or demanded they meet at midnight. Ronan was familiar with such a sensation and welcomed it, wore it like a second skin. 

This place, the noiselessness, the stillness, was his home. And Ronan realized that he didn’t care if Adam knew about him and Noah. He didn’t care if Adam showed up tonight, either. He didn’t care, so long as there was this, the sun, the endless blue sky, and the days where he could bike and swim and listen to his music without interruption. 

No one, not even Adam, could put an end to that. 

The rest of the afternoon moved in a haze of lounging and drinking and touching. Ronan insisted Noah stay with him, insisted they stroke each other to finishing again, this time in the attic in utter silence, never breaking eye contact. He hoped Noah might call out, might alert Adam to what they were doing, but he never did, and another part of Ronan was glad for Noah’s peacefulness, glad to hold his head between his hands and to kiss his eyebrows, one by one. 

It was dinnertime before Noah left and Ronan was alone again. Adam didn’t come to dinner, not that Ronan expected him to, and yet it left a sour taste in his mouth. There were guests, of course, a man named Henry Cheng for Virginia, another American who was both too loud and too eccentric, who wouldn’t stop harassing Ronan about his hair, his freckles, his sunburn. 

Ronan told him multiple times that he spoke terrible Italian with the objective of hurting his feelings. It only made Henry laugh, and then Blue laughed, and then Maura and then Gansey.

He was unnerved at their casualness. Didn’t they realize it was less than three hours until the big moment? Didn’t they know what Ronan was walking in to? Couldn’t they see it in his blush, his glare? Couldn’t they smell the sex on him, the scent of lust unbridled, unmet, yearning yearning hearing for a set of hands that didn’t belong to Noah?

After supper, Gansey forced Ronan to play on the piano. He resisted at first, feigning tiredness, when, in reality, he didn’t want to turn his back to the clock, which sat on the mantle. But Blue had put a hand on his shoulder, guided him up off his chair and onto the bench. Henry, Gansey, and Blue crowded around him, listened in rapt awe as he played his favorite Chopin, a quick piece almost as quick as his pulse.

Finally, when the clock struck eleven, he excused himself and went upstairs. For a shower, he told himself, and a book. Maybe some transcribing. If he even so much as alluded to himself what was supposed to be waiting for him in his room, he might never had made it up the stairs.

But finally in his the quiet stillness of his room, Ronan couldn’t help the imaginings of life after _midnight._ Would he finally know Adam? And would Adam finally know him? Would they go back to normal, or would the world tilt them ever closer, or maybe, further apart? Of course nothing might happen. They might just talk, sit on Ronan’s bed and skate around what they truly wanted to say to each other.

But it didn’t matter anymore. Ronan was past waiting and wanting and wanting and wanting. He was ripe with a humiliation he couldn’t escape, and no longer did it hurt to know. He wanted to tell Adam everything. He didn’t want to beg, anymore. He didn’t want to grovel and be weak. He wanted Adam to see him, truly see him, once and for all.

If, at the end of it, Adam left him and they never shared another word, Ronan was sure he could survive it. As long as he was true now.

When the clock struck midnight, there was silence from Adam’s room. 

But Ronan made a pact that he was done waiting, and so he decided to go to Adam himself. 

Ronan went out onto their shared balcony and hovered by the door to Adam’s room. There was no light on inside, and the shadowy interior was still. Something tugged at him, then, from beneath his rib cage, pulled him closer and closer to the glass panes of Adam’s door. 

Ronan laid his hand onto the handle, let himself memorize the cool shape of it beneath his palm. He could turn around now, forgo everything. This seemed like a moment for decisions, and his mind blindly supplied retreat. But no, he was past retreat now. He was well into the realm of fear, now, but it was fear that propelled him farther. That realization washed over him like water in the tide. 

He knocked, softly, and the sudden shifting from within caused Ronan a spike of arousal. 

A light flickered on, and his shadow was against the opposite wall. Ronan suddenly couldn’t breathe, let his hand lie palm flat on the glass paned door.

And then he was there, almost a reflection in the glass, but he was smiling, coyly, pulling open the door as quietly as he could. 

“I’m so glad you came,” he said, at last, some moments later, when breathing at each other was suddenly no longer enough. “I heard you moving around your room. I thought you changed your might. That you were going to bed.”

“Of course I was came.”

Adam was fussing, wasn’t he, pulling at the end of his shirt, tugging a hand through downy brown hair. It was odd, to see him so flustered, unsure, even. Ronan realized that he must be nervous too, as nervous, maybe more so than Ronan had been all day. 

Ronan stepped into Adam’s room—Ronan’s old room—and then Adam closed the balcony door behind them. They were whispering, Ronan noticed, not with their voices, but with their bodies, as if by moving too loudly they might scare the other off. 

Adam tiptoed to the bed and sat down, folded his legs up under him. There was far too much room between them, Ronan thought, wildly.

And yet, Ronan couldn’t bring himself to move. He hovered by the French door, said the first thing that came to his mind, “I’m nervous.”

Adam flicked his gaze up. “Me too.”

“I’m more nervous than you are.”

A smile, then, timid and genuine and Ronan’s heart nearly burst right then. 

Adam held out his hand and Ronan stepped towards him. It was something to do.

When Ronan was in front of him, Adam dropped his hand, looked down at it in his lap. He looked incredibly young all of a sudden, and uncharacteristically unsure. It made Ronan love him all the more for it. It felt true.

“Sit,” Adam said, finally, touched the bed next to him. Ronan obliged, sat facing him on the edge of the bed, legs crossed up beneath him. He was suddenly no longer nervous. All the fear of touching and wanting and messing up and ruining whatever this was washed away like sand in the edie. Ronan _wanted_ and that seemed all the more urgent than the chances he might make a fool of himself.

He let their knees touch. Adam looked up at him, shy shy shy, and Ronan looked back.

“You okay?” Adam asked.

“I’m okay.”

Ronan reached out, touched his fingers along each of Adam’s elegantly curved toes, rubbed the pads of his fingers along the protruding bones there. He couldn’t help himself. He wanted to touch and never stop touching. When Adam didn’t flinch or push him away, it only fueled his desire. He rubbed his hands against the soft hair of Adam’s calves. 

“What are you doing?” Adam finally asked, more like croaked, into the hazy silence of the room.

“Nothing.” Ronan rubbed his hands against Adam’s calves again, let his palms fold neatly around Adam’s bony knees. 

“Are you happy?”

Ronan nodded, chest swelling. 

As if the answer Adam had been looking for, he wrapped his arms around Ronan and pulled them chest to chest, pulled them back and down so they were against the bed, holding one another. “Are you sure you want this?” he whispered somewhere near Ronan’s left ear. Ronan nodded vigorously, pressed his forehead into the crook of Adam’s shoulder. 

There were no words to describe how desperately he wanted this, just hands and feet and toes and rubbing, up and down, along the smooth contour of Adam’s back. 

Adam lifted Ronan’s face then, held it between two hands and stared so intently Ronan thought he might start crying. “Can I kiss you?” he asked, instead, and without thinking, without answering, Ronan pressed their lips together. 

The room hummed to life and became still all at once, as if something became brighter and clearer as they kissed and continued to kiss, lips sliding and opening, tongues probing and licking, and someone, or both of them, moaning into the other. It was just them, two men, kissing and wanting to be kissed and wanting to press closer closer closer. 

Ronan felt more sure than he ever had in his entire life. Adam’s hands on either side of his face anchored him to this moment, tied them together in some unspoken vow. 

And then the sheets were pulled back, and they were a below the covers, and Adam slowly slowly slowly undressed him. Ronan arched into it, let his back lift off the bed as Adam peeled each article of clothing off his body. Fingers lingered and caressed and scratched and Ronan balled his fist into the pillow under his head when Adam kissed the elastic of his underwear. 

“Off off off,” Adam mouthed into the waistband and Ronan smiled, laughed to the ceiling, warm with intimacy, with Adam’s skin, and finally, they were naked. 

Adam sat back, then, legs over Ronan’s legs—and how did that happen, how did Adam come to straddle him like this, how was it that Ronan was pressed against the bed and Adam was above him? But Adam just stared and stared and stared, ran his hands along Ronan’s bare chest, down down down. 

Ronan flushed hot pink, tossed an arm over his face, momentarily too flustered to continue. 

Adam stopped moving immediately, touched Ronan’s arm lightly. “Hey,” he said, and it was so gentle, so concerned, that Ronan let his arm fall away, let them make eye contact again.

And Adam was so beautiful, so smooth and real and full and whole. Ronan’s face must have shown the full breadth of his emotions, because Adam whimpered, then, needy and wanton and deliciously warm. His hands were on each side of Ronan’s face again and they were kissing, brutal and desirous and tender all at once. 

Ronan felt he must have revealed something about himself in the time that followed, the obscenities he moaned into Adam’s neck, licked against Adam’s chest, around his cock, as Adam pushed into him the first time, cradled him through the pain and the fullness and the fevered wanting. They whispered to each other, mouth to mouth, moved and rocked and held onto one another like there was nothing but the two of them, this room, this bed, their cocks hard and thick and leaking. Ronan felt dizzy with it all, felt so fuzzy and warm, prickling with heat that, when he finally came, it was as Adam whispered into his ear, “Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unbeta'd. hope you enjoyed. 
> 
> come find me on [tumblr](https://onthesea-mystery.tumblr.com/).

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everyone! This is my first fic in about 10 years. It's also my first TRC fic, also unbeta'd, so please be kind if you can (:
> 
> I've fallen in love with Call Me By Your Name (if you haven't read/seen it, please do!) & could not get this idea out of my head. There will be some divergence from the CMBYN story, but I'm imagining a lot of the structure/plot will be very similar. You might also notice some slight canon divergence with the characters, but this is all done in good faith! I'd love to hear your thoughts & I hope you all enjoy.
> 
> (ps, gifted to moreraventhanothers. thank you for being a constant inspiration)


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